The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies 2018054392, 9781138058903, 9781351672627, 9781351672634, 9781351672610, 9781315163932

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES

The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies provides scholars and students of American Studies with theoretical and applied essays that help to define Transnational American Studies as a discipline and practice. In more than 30 essays, the volume offers a history of the concept of the “transnational” and takes readers from the Barbary frontier to Guam, from Mexico’s border crossings to the intifada’s contested zones. Together, the essays develop new ways for Americanists to read events, images, sound, literature, identity, film, politics, or performance transnationally through the work of diverse figures, such as Confucius, Edward Said, Pauline Hopkins, Poe, Faulkner, Onoto Watanna, and others. This timely volume also addresses presidential politics and interpictorial US history from Lincoln in Africa, to Obama and Mandela, to Trump. The essays, written by prominent global Americanists, as well as emerging scholars shaping the field, seek to provide foundational resources as well as experimental and forward-leaning approaches to Transnational American Studies. Nina Morgan is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Transnational American Studies (Stanford University) and a professor of critical theory and literature at Kennesaw State University, USA, where she is also a founder of the American Studies program. Alfred Hornung is Research Professor of English and American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany. He is also Director of the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies. Takayuki Tatsumi is Professor of American Literature and Critical Theory at Keio University, Tokyo, Japan. He has served as President of The American Literature Society of Japan and The Poe Society of Japan, in addition to serving as Vice President of the Melville Society of Japan.

ROUTLEDGE LITERATURE COMPANIONS

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE Edited by Deborah L. Madsen THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO TRAVEL WRITING Edited by Carl Thompson THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND RELIGION Edited by Mark Knight THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO INTER-AMERICAN STUDIES Edited by Wilfried Raussert THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO THE ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES Edited by Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Edited by John Stephens, with Celia Abicalil Belmiro, Alice Curry, Li Lifang and Yasmine S. Motawy THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO PICTUREBOOKS Edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO WORLD LITERATURE AND WORLD HISTORY Edited by May Hawas THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO PAKISTANI ANGLOPHONE WRITING Edited by Aroosa Kanwal and Saiyma Aslam THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND ECONOMICS Edited by Matt Seybold and Michelle Chihara THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY LITERATURE Edited by Daniel O’Gorman and Robert Eaglestone THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES Edited by Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung and Takayuki Tatsumi For more information on this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/literature/series/RC4444

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES

Edited by Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung and Takayuki Tatsumi

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung, and Takayuki Tatsumi; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung, and Takayuki Tatsumi to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Morgan, Nina, editor. | Hornung, Alfred, editor. | Tatsumi, Takayuki, 1955- editor. Title: The Routledge companion to transnational American studies / edited by Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung and Takayuki Tatsumi. Description: London ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018054392| ISBN 9781138058903 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781351672627 (epub) | ISBN 9781351672634 (web pdf) | ISBN 9781351672610 (mobikindle) Subjects: LCSH: United States--Study and teaching. | United States--Civilization. | Transnationalism. Classification: LCC E175.8 .R68 2019 | DDC 973.0071--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018054392 ISBN: 978-1-138-05890-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-16393-2 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

CONTENTS

List of figures List of contributors Preface

ix xi xix

Introduction: Recognizing Transnational American Studies Alfred Hornung and Nina Morgan 1 Collaboration in Transnational American Studies Shelley Fisher Fishkin

1

9

PART I

Theorizing Transnational American Studies

29

2 Reorienting the transnational: Transatlantic, transpacific, and antipodean Paul Giles

31

3 Worlding America and Transnational American Studies Oliver Scheiding

41

4 Archipelagic American Studies: An open and comparative insularity Brian Russell Roberts

51

5 The transnational poetics of Edward Said: Dangerous affiliations and impossible comparisons Mina Karavanta 6 The Pacific turn: Transnational Asian American Studies William Nessly

v

61

71

Contents

PART II

Culture and performance: Histories and reciprocities

83

7 Cultural performance and Transnational American Studies Birgit M. Bauridl and Pia Wiegmink

85

8 The Barbary frontier and transnational allegories of freedom Karim Bejjit

96

9 Stages of crossing: Transnational Indigenous futures Birgit Däwes

106

10 The assembling of trans-indigènitude through international circuits of poetry Gloria E. Chacón

116

11 Traveling sounds: Haitian vodou, Michael Jackson, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers Sabine Kim

126

PART III

Translating texts and transnationalizing contexts

137

12 Translating Poe in New York in the 1880s: Or, Poe’s other transnationalism Emron Esplin

139

13 Confucius and America: The moral constitution of statecraft Alfred Hornung

148

14 Translations of American cultural politics into the context of post-war Japan Hiromi Ochi

164

15 A mixed legacy: Chinoiserie and Japonisme in Onoto Watanna’s A Japanese Nightingale Yoshiko Uzawa

173

16 Gender and Transnational American Studies Sarah Ruffing Robbins

vi

183

Contents

17 Ethiopianism, gender, and transnationalism in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood Elizabeth West

193

18 Transnationalism, autobiography, and criticism: The spaces of women’s imagination Isabel Durán

202

PART IV

Political imaginaries and transnational images of the political

215

19 Iconography, interpictoriality, and Transnational American Studies Udo J. Hebel

217

20 The visual aesthetics of privacy in American presidential politics and its transatlantic influence Karsten Fitz

232

21 Lincoln in Africa Kevin Gaines

254

22 Laws of Forgiveness: Obama, Mandela, Derrida Nina Morgan

266

23 Visual intertextuality and Transnational American Studies: Revisiting American exceptionalism Rob Kroes

282

24 Post-truth = post-narrative?: Reading the narrative liminality of transnational right-wing populism Sebastian M. Herrmann

288

25 American realities: A European perspective on Trump’s America Liam Kennedy

297

PART V

Remapping geographies and genres

305

26 The performance of American popular culture: Rhetoric and symbolic forms in American Western movies Boris Vejdovsky

307

vii

Contents

27 Border encounters: Theorizing the US–Mexico border as transa Jennifer A. Reimer

316

28 Transnational and intersectional implications of the intifada Denijal Jegic´

327

29 Guam, Un-Inc.; or Craig Santos Perez’s transterritorial challenge to American Studies as usual Mary A. Knighton 30 Post-apocalyptic geographies and structural appropriation Hsuan L. Hsu and Bryan Yazell

338

347

31 Thinking after the hemispheric: The planetary expanse of transnational American writing Takayuki Tatsumi

357

Index

370

viii

FIGURES

The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Faber, 1957) 274–275 Pieter Balthazar Bouttatz, El almirante Christoval Colon descubre la Isla Española 19.2 Henry Sargent. Landing of the Pilgrims 19.3 Joe Rosenthal. U.S. Soldiers Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima 19.4 John Paul Filo. Mary Ann Vecchio Kneeling over Jeffrey Miller during Kent State Protest 19.5 Interpictorial Cluster around John Paul Filo’s Photograph of 4 May 1970 19.6 Chuck Kennedy. President Barack Obama at Port Fourchon Beach, LA, 28 May 2010 19.7 Cecil Stoughton. President Lyndon B. Johnson with Fletcher Family in Inez, KY 19.8 Pete Souza. President Obama outside the U.S. Ambassador’s Residence, Paris, 7 June 2009 19.9 Raphael. The School of Athens. Fresco, 1509–11 19.10 Pete Souza. President Barack Obama at the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, 19 June 2013 20.1 President Reagan riding his horse “El Alamein” at Rancho Del Cielo, California, on 8 April 1985 20.2 President Reagan in cowboy hat at Rancho Del Cielo in 1976 20.3 Nicolas Sarkozy as French Secretary of the Interior and “political celebrity du jour” (Lechevallier 2006) in May 2002 in a cover story of the French weekly magazine Paris Match (with his second wife Cecelia and their son Louis) 20.4 Sarkozy in the spring of 2007, when he was presidential candidate for the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), as he visits a ranch in the Camargue region on the last day of campaigning 20.5 President Macron with one of the stars of the EU flag in the background. The image was originally published with the following caption: “At any rate, the halo is properly in place” (Högele 2017) 20.6 President Obama during a press conference in the White House, 11 March 2011 20.7 Karl-Theodor and Stephanie zu Guttenberg during a reception (Schumacher) 13.1 19.1

ix

151 218 219 220 222 223 225 225 227 227 228 242 242

245

245

246 246 248

List of illustrations

21.1 21.2 27.1 27.2 27.3

Kwame Nkrumah, 1958 Ghana commemorative stamps, 1965 Photograph by Julie Orozco Photograph by Tarek Elhaik Photograph by Rogelio Núñez

261 262 318 318 320

x

CONTRIBUTORS

Birgit M. Bauridl is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Regensburg University and Managing Director of the Regensburg European American Forum. Her research focuses on transnational critical regionalism; German-American spaces; cultural performance; and postWWII transnational memory. Her publications include Betwixt, Between, or Beyond: Negotiating Transformations from the Liminal Sphere of Contemporary Black Performance Poetry (2013); South Africa and the United States in Transnational American Studies (co-ed. Udo J. Hebel; special issue Amerikastudien/American Studies 2014); and Approaching Transnational America in Performance (co-ed. Pia Wiegmink, 2016). She chairs the ASA International Committee and, with Pia Wiegmink, heads the DFG-funded research network “Cultural Performance in Transnational American Studies.” Karim Bejjit holds an MA in Postcolonial Studies from the University of Kent, UK (1996) and a Doctorat d’Etat (PhD) in English from University Mohamed I, Morocco (2000). He is Professor of English Studies and current Head of the Department of English at University Abdelmalek Essaadi, Tetouan Morocco. From 2000 to 2016, he taught American Studies at Hassan II University Casablanca and directed the Moroccan American Studies Research Laboratory. He is the recipient of several research grants including NIAS (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Research) grant (2007) and a Post-Doc Fulbright grant (2011). During 2013–14, he taught English literature and modern criticism at Tabuk University, Saudi Arabia. He is the author of English Colonial Texts on Tangier, 1661–1684: Imperialism and the Politics of Resistance (Ashgate 2015; Routledge, 2016). His other publications include an edited volume of essays on nineteenth-century European travel discourse on Morocco in Arabic, several book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles in English and Arabic. Gloria E. Chacón is Associate Professor in the Literature Department at UCSD. Chacón’s work has been published in Colombia, Mexico, Germany, Canada, and the USA. She has co-edited a special issue on Indigenous Literatures for Diálogo (DePaul University). Her book, Cosmolectics: Kab’awil and the Making of Contemporary Maya and Zapotec Literatures is part of the Critical Indigeneities Series at UNC Press, (2018). Birgit Däwes is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Flensburg, Germany. In addition to her award-winning monograph study on Native North American Theater in a xi

List of contributors

Global Age (Heidelberg: Winter 2007), she wrote Ground Zero Fiction: History, Memory, and Representation in the American 9/11 Novel (Heidelberg: Winter 2011) and edited or co-edited volumes such as Native American Survivance, Memory, and Futurity: The Gerald Vizenor Continuum (Routledge 2016), Transgressive Television (Heidelberg: Winter 2015), and Indigenous North American Drama: A Multivocal History (SUNY Press 2013). She is co-founder and co-editor of the Routledge book series “Transnational Indigenous Perspectives.” Isabel Durán is Professor of American Literature, Vice-Provost for International Affairs at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain), and the President of SAAS (Spanish Association for American Studies). From 2008 to 2011, she served as a member of the General Council of the American Studies Association and of its International Committee from 2005 to 2008. She was a research fellow at the Real Colegio Complutense (Harvard University) in 2012 and a Fulbright grantee in 2000. Her research and publication record on gender studies, literature, autobiography, and ethnicity include an eight-volume Gender Studies collection (the last one being the bilingual Estudios De Género: Visiones Transatlánticas / Gender Studies: Transatlantic Visions, 2016), following her book Autobiography: Female Versions in 20th Century American Literature (in Spanish). She is also the co-editor of the book Miradas Transatlánticas / Transatlantic Vistas: Cultural Exchanges between Europe and the US (Madrid, 2011). She is at present working on a book about contemporary American autobiography, and is doing research on Aging Studies, as part of a research team. She is the creator of the Complutense Research Group “Women’s Studies in the Anglophone Countries.” Emron Esplin is an Associate Professor of English at Brigham Young University, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century US literature and inter-American literary studies. He is the author of Borges’s Poe: Influence and the Reinvention of Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish America (Georgia UP, 2016) and the editor, with Margarida Vale de Gato, of Translated Poe (Lehigh UP, 2014). Apart from his work on Poe and Borges, he has published articles on Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, Nellie Campobello, Pancho Villa, Julio Cortázar, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, Professor of English, and Director of American Studies at Stanford University, where she is also co-director of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project. Having served as President of the American Studies Association and the Mark Twain Circle of America, Dr. Fishkin also cofounded the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society and is a founding editor of the Journal of Transnational American Studies. She is the author, editor, or co-editor of 47 books, and over 150 articles, essays and reviews, many of which focus on recovering previously silenced voices from the past. She earned her PhD in American Studies from Yale. Karsten Fitz is Professor of American Studies at the University of Passau, Germany. He has published the monographs Negotiating History and Culture: Transculturation in Contemporary Native American Fiction (2001) and The American Revolution Remembered, 1830s to 1850s: Competing Images and Conflicting Narratives (2011) and (co-)edited anthologies on Visual Representations of Native Americans: Transnational Contexts and Perspectives (2012), Cultures of Privacy: Paradigms, Transformations, Contestations, and Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Indigenous Studies: Native North America in (Trans)Motion (both 2015). Fitz also is the co-editor of the book series Routledge Research in Transnational Indigenous Perspectives. xii

List of contributors

Kevin Gaines is the Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice at the University of Virginia, and previously held the position of W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Africana Studies and History at Cornell University. He is the author of Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture During the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 1996). His book, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (UNC Press, 2006) was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. He is a past president of the American Studies Association (2009–10) and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Transnational American Studies. He is the author of The African American Journey: A Global History (forthcoming Oxford University Press). Paul Giles is the Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney, Australia. He served as President of the International American Studies Association from 2005 to 2007. He is the author of Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture (Oxford UP, 2019); Antipodean America: Australasia and the Constitution of U.S. Literature (Oxford UP, 2014); The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton UP, 2011); Transnationalism in Practice: Essays on American Studies, Literature and Religion (Edinburgh UP, 2010); Atlantic Republic: The American Tradition in English Literature (Oxford UP, 2006); Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (Duke UP, 2002); Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (University of Pennsylvania P, 2001); American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics (Cambridge UP, 1992); Hart Crane: The Contexts of The Bridge (Cambridge UP, 1986). Udo J. Hebel is Professor and Chair of American Studies at Regensburg University, Germany. His recent publications include Transnational American Memories (2009), Transnational American Studies (2012), South Africa and the United States in Transnational American Studies (co-ed., 2014), New England Forefathers’ Day Orations, 1770–1865 (2016). He is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA. He was President of the German Association for American Studies, General Editor of Amerikastudien / American Studies, and Chair of the ASA International Committee. He is the Founding Director of the Regensburg European American Forum. Since 2013, he has been President of Regensburg University. Sebastian M. Herrmann is the author of Presidential Unrealities: Epistemic Panic, Cultural Work, and the US Presidency (Winter, 2012) and an editor of Poetics of Politics: Textuality and Social Relevance in Contemporary American Literature and Culture (Winter, 2015) and two other collections on American literary and cultural studies. Based at the Institute for American Studies, University of Leipzig, he has recently been awarded a grant by the German Research Foundation (DFG) to organize an academic network investigating “narrative liminality”. He is currently working on a postdoctoral project on the rise of the “data imaginary” in nineteenth-century US literature and culture (www.data-imaginary.de). Alfred Hornung is Research Professor of American Studies and Director of the Obama Institute of Transnational American Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. His publications are in the fields of modernism, postmodernism, life writing, intercultural, and transnational studies. He is an editor of the American Studies Monograph Series, the Journal of Transnational American Studies and on the editorial board of several journals, including Atlantic Studies, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, European Journal of Life Writing, Journal of Life Writing and Contemporary Foreign Literature (Nanjing). He served as President of MESEA (the Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas, 2000–2004), as xiii

List of contributors

President of the German Association for American Studies (2002–2005), and as a member of the International Committee of the ASA. In 2013, he received the Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize of the ASA. In 2014, he was elected a member of Academia Europaea. Hsuan L. Hsu is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge, 2010) and Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization (NYU, 2015). Dr Hsu is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Literary Geographies, American Literary Realism, and American Literature. His current research investigates olfactory aesthetics as a mode of engaging with environmental risk. Denijal Jegic´ is a postdoctoral scholar who studied at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and York University in Toronto. In July 2018 he completed his PhD degree in American Studies at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz). For his dissertation Trans/Intifada. The Politics and Poetics of Intersectional Resistance, which combines historiographic, political, cultural, and literary analyses of subaltern articulations of dissent and resistance, he conducted extensive research in Lebanon, Palestine, and the United States. He has published academic and journalistic papers on several social media platforms and has spoken at conferences in the Middle East, Europe, and North America. Mina Karavanta is Associate Professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She specializes in postcolonial studies, critical theory, and comparative literature and has published articles in international academic journals such as boundary 2, Feminist Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Mosaic, Symploke-, and Journal of Contemporary Theory. She co-edited Interculturality and Gender, with Joan Anim-Addo and Giovanna Covi, and Edward Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid, with Nina Morgan. She is a founding member and co-editor of the peer-reviewed electronic journal Synthesis (synthesis. enl.uoa.gr) which publishes transcultural and interdisciplinary research. Liam Kennedy is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin. He is the author of Susan Sontag (1995), Race and Urban Space in American Culture (2000), and Afterimages: Photography and US Foreign Policy (2016), and editor of Urban Space and Representation (1999), The Visual Culture of Urban Regeneration (2004), The Wire (2012), The Violence of the Image (2014), and Neoliberalism and American Literature (2019). He is currently researching books on Irish America, diaspora diplomacy, and the cultural and political impact of the presidency of Donald Trump. Sabine Kim is Managing Editor of the Journal of Transnational American Studies. Dr Kim’s latest publications, Acoustic Entanglements: Sound and Aesthetic Practice (Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017) and “Travelling Totems and Networks of Mobility: Indigenous Challenges to Dispossession” (2016) reflect her diverse teaching interests which also include Indigenous literature and activism, transnational American studies, and critical animal studies. Dr Kim is currently working on a project that examines the relations between waste and wealth as circuits of economy and property. Mary A. Knighton is Professor of Literature at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo and has taught and published widely on both American and modern Japanese literature and xiv

List of contributors

culture. Her essays have appeared in Faulkner and Twain, ed. Robert Hamblin (2009); Faulkner and Print Culture, ed. Jay Watson (2017); Animal Comics: Multispecies Storyworlds in Graphic Narratives, ed. David Herman (2017); US-Japan Women’s Journal (2011); Japan Forum (2017); and Notes & Queries (2017). Her current book project, Insect Selves: Posthumanism in Modern Japanese Literature and Culture, is supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant JP17K02663, ACLS/ NEH/SSRC, and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Rob Kroes is Professor Emeritus and former Chair of the American Studies program at the University of Amsterdam as well as honorary Professor of American Studies, University of Utrecht. He earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands (1971). He is a past President of the European Association for American Studies (EAAS, 1992–1996). His publications include: If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall: Europeans and American Mass Culture (1996), Predecessors: Intellectual Lineages in American Studies (1998), Them and Us: Questions of Citizenship in a Globalizing World (2000), and Straddling Borders: The American Resonance in Transnational Identities (2004). With Robert W. Rydell he co-authored a book entitled Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922 (2005). His most recent books are Photographic Memories: Private Pictures, Public Images, and American History (2007) and Prison Area, Independence Valley: American Paradoxes in Political Life and Popular Culture (2015). Nina Morgan is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Transnational American Studies (Stanford). An Obama Fellow (Obama Institute, University of Mainz 2017), REAF Fellow (2016) and Vielberth Fellow (University of Regensburg, 2016), Dr Morgan also serves on the advisory board of Synthesis (University of Athens, Greece) and has been an editor of Asian America: Journal of Culture and the Arts (UCSB) and of the Review of Japanese Culture and Society (Josai University, Japan); with Mina Karavanta, she co-edited Edward Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid (2008). Dr Morgan is a founder and honorary member of the Moroccan American Studies Association, a nationwide organization based at Hassan II University Casablanca in Morocco, where she lectures regularly; she is also formerly the national co-chair and Chair of the American Studies Association Women’s Committee and is a current member of the International Committee. Her work has been published in the USA, India, Morocco, England, Germany, Japan, and Spain. William Nessly is Associate Professor of English at West Chester University. He received his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in English Literature, a master’s degree in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a bachelor’s degree in German from Swarthmore College. The recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies and a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS) in Japanese, William Nessly specializes in Asian American literature, transnational American studies, and postcolonial and narrative theory. His article titled “Plotting Colonial Independence: Intra-Asian Conflict in the Novels of Richard Kim” was recently published in the journal MELUS, and his current book project, The Polycentric Transpacific: Intra-Asian Conflict and Japanese Imperialism in Asian American Literature, reexamines Asian American fiction and drama through the historical context of Japan’s colonial empire (1895–1945), with a particular focus on intra-Asian conflict and the use of narrative form to symbolize colonial power relations. He is a lifetime member of the American Studies Association and was selected to serve as one of two ASA Delegates to the Japanese Association for American Studies (JAAS). xv

List of contributors

Hiromi Ochi is Professor of American Literature at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo. Her interest is in the literature of the American South, the political aspects of New Criticism, and Cold War cultural politics. She has published Truman Capote: His Life and Works (Bensei Shuppan, 2005, in Japanese), The Southern Moment of Modernism: Southern Poets and Cold War (Kenkyusha, 2012, in Japanese), and contributed essays to books including Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War (U Mass, 2010) and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Jennifer A. Reimer is a Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellow (American Studies) at the University of Graz, Austria. Previously Assistant Professor in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, Dr Reimer received her PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011, and her MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco in 2005. She is the 2011 winner of the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award for Independent Scholars, awarded by the Women's Committee of the American Studies Association. Her first prose poetry book, The Rainy Season Diaries, was released in 2013 by Quale Press. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Achiote Press, an independent press dedicated to spotlighting underrepresented authors and artists. Sarah Ruffing Robbins is Lorraine Sherley Professor of Literature at Texas Christian University. Her academic books include the 2017 monograph, Learning Legacies: Archive to Action through Women’s Cross-cultural Teaching; The Cambridge Introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Managing Literacy, Mothering America, winner of a Choice Award. With Ann Pullen, she co-edited Nellie Arnott’s Writings on Angola, 1905–1913. A number of her collaborative books grew out of public humanities initiatives. Current projects involve transatlantic partnerships supported by Edinburgh University Press, including a book series on American literature and a primary text anthology for teaching transatlantic culture. Dr Robbins’ website (https://sarahruffingrobbins.com/) includes regular blog postings linking academic study with questions about social justice issues. Brian Russell Roberts is Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Brigham Young University. He has published in journals including American Literature, Atlantic Studies, American Literary History, and PMLA. His books include Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era (Virginia, 2013), and, with Keith Foulcher, Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference (Duke, 2016). He is the editor, with Michelle Stephens, of the collection Archipelagic American Studies (Duke, 2017). His in-progress book is titled Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America. Oliver Scheiding is one of the co-directors of the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies in Mainz, Germany. His research focuses on print culture, periodical studies, and early American Studies. His most recent publications are Worlding America: A Transnational Anthology of Short Narratives before 1800 (Stanford UP, 2015), and the volume The Press and the Pulpit: Religious Periodicals and Publishing in Transnational Contexts(Cambridge Scholars, 2017). He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Amerikastudien / American Studies, the quarterly of the German Association of American Studies. Takayuki Tatsumi has taught American Literature and Critical Theory at Keio University, Tokyo, since 1989. He has served as President of The American Literature Society of Japan xvi

List of contributors

(2014–2017) and of The Poe Society of Japan (2009–) and as Vice President of the Melville Society of Japan (2012–); he is currently a member of the editorial board of PARADOXA, Mark Twain Studies and the Journal of Transnational American Studies. His book Full Metal Apache: Transactions between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America (Duke UP, 2006) won the 2010 IAFA (International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts) Distinguished Scholarship Award. Co-editor of the “New Japanese Fiction” issue of Review of Contemporary Fiction (Summer 2002) and the special “Three Asias—Japan, S. Korea, China” issue of PARADOXA (No.22, 2010), he has also published a variety of essays in Critique, Para*Doxa, Extrapolation, American Book Review, Mechademia and elsewhere on subjects ranging from the American Renaissance to post-cyberpunk fiction and film. His major publications include: “Literary History on the Road: Transatlantic Crossings and Transpacific Crossovers” (PMLA 119.1, Jan 2004) and Young Americans in Literature: The Post-Romantic Turn in the Age of Poe, Hawthorne and Melville (Sairyusha, 2018). Yoshiko Uzawa is Professor of English at Keio University. She has authored two books in Japanese, one on the topic of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and literary hysteria, and another on pseudo-Japanese authors in racial / ethnic / gender disguises, whose appearances in the New York literary world in the 1900s marked the heyday of American popular literary Japonism (e). Uzawa’s second book Hashimura Togo: Yellowface and the Japanese in American Popular Literature (U of Tokyo P, 2008) won the 25th Joseph Roggendorf Book Award, and inspired distinguished playwright Yoji Sakate to produce the play Hashimura Togo (2009). Boris Vejdovsky PhD, is an Associate Professor (Maître d’enseignement et de recherche) at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, where he teaches American literature and American studies. His main interests are in rhetoric, ethics, and cultural formations. He is the author of two books, Ideas of Order: Ethics and Topos in American Literature (2007) and Hemingway: A Life in Pictures (2010, translated into five languages). He is the editor of two volumes, Body Politics (1999) and The Seeming and the Seen (2006), and the General Editor of the Peter Lang Series Transatlantic Aesthetics and Culture, which has issued eight volumes to date. He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on American authors and on the cultural and historical emergence of the phenomenon known as “America.” Boris Vejdovsky has served as the President of the Senate of the University of Lausanne and on various professional boards, including as Chair of the International Committee of the ASA. Elizabeth West is Professor of English at Georgia State University. Dr West focuses on spirituality and gender in early African American and African Diaspora literatures of the Americas. She is the author of African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: (2011) and coeditor of Literary Expressions of African Spirituality (2013). She has edited and coedited projects and has published widely in critical anthologies and journals. Dr West is Treasurer of the College Language Association, Executive Director of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, and serves on the Advisory Board of the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies. Pia Wiegmink is Assistant Professor at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany. Her research focuses on political performance, antislavery literature, and Transnational American Studies. In 2012, she was a visiting scholar at Georgetown U (DAAD post-doc) and in 2017 a visiting professor at York U, Toronto. She published Protest EnACTed (2011), Approaching Transnational America in xvii

List of contributors

Performance (2016, co-ed. with Birgit Bauridl) and a special issue of Atlantic Studies on German Entanglements with Slavery (2017, co-ed. with Heike Raphael-Hernandez). Together with Birgit Bauridl (University of Regensburg), she heads the international research network “Cultural Performance in Transnational American Studies” (2015–2018), funded by the German Research Foundation. Bryan Yazell is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern Denmark. With assistance from the Danish National Research Foundation (grant no. DNRF127), his current research examines the intersections of literature and law on the subjects of homelessness, poverty, and migration policy. Work deriving from this scholarship has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, James Joyce Quarterly, and the Journal of Transnational American Studies.

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PREFACE

The vision for this collection originated with Routledge Senior Editor Polly Dodson whose interest in the field of Transnational American Studies has only been strengthened, we hope, in the time it has taken to produce this exciting volume. As editors of this Routledge Companion, we would like to thank all of our contributors for their illuminating, insightful essays and for their eager cooperation throughout the editorial process. We are particularly grateful to Dr Melanie Hanslik for corresponding with the authors while copy editing and formatting the texts at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies in Mainz. At press, Polly Dodson served as our constant and graceful guide in all matters from the conception of the volume to its finish, providing valuable advice for making this Companion important to our readers. We are immensely grateful for her belief in these efforts and for her democratic outlook. We would also like to acknowledge the collaboration of our colleagues on the Editorial Board of The Journal of Transnational American Studies and, vicariously, all of the contributors to the journal whose compelling and challenging scholarship helped shape the nature and scope of this important field of inquiry. While we cannot name the many people who have brought this field to the fore today, we do wish to acknowledge that we always keep our colleagues in mind, with care, especially those we remember “in spirit.” We are also thankful for the reviewers on this project who prepared the way for this shared achievement. Our universities have been very supportive of this effort, and we would like to thank Keio University, Kennesaw State University, and Johannes Gutenberg University for valuing our commitment to this project. We hope that the Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies will foster and enhance the work of the community of American Studies scholars globally in their common efforts to shape the transnational constitution of the United States of America. Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung, and Takayuki Tatsumi

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INTRODUCTION Recognizing Transnational American Studies Alfred Hornung and Nina Morgan

On the occasion of the centenary celebration commemorating South African President Nelson Mandela’s birth, US President Barack Obama spoke in July of 2018 in Johannesburg, highlighting the impact of the example of the South African leader on the young American: Madiba’s light shone so brightly, even from that narrow Robben Island cell, that in the late ’70s he could inspire a young college student on the other side of the world to reexamine his own priorities, could make me consider the small role I might play in bending the arc of the world towards justice.1 Taking account of the transnational flow from South Africa to the USA, Obama observes that together with Mandela’s release from prison and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Obama then a political science student at Columbia University saw himself shaped by a “wave of hope”— a universal wave of hope—that had a global impact. Figured as what became a lesson in democracy, Mandela’s “democratic vision” was clearly an inspiration for the future American president. Looking toward South Africa for lessons in leadership, civic responsibility, and for a democratic vision may not have been the direction many traditionalists might have imagined possible for an American president, yet Obama testifies to this transnational trajectory, one that decenters the US as the origin story of the long walk towards democracy and freedom. One hundred years after the birth of Nelson Mandela, “it’s time” Obama suggests, “for us to stop paying all of our attention to the world’s capitals and centers of power….” We couldn’t agree more (see Morgan in this volume). Like Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama stands for the idea of a transnational alliance, not only in politics but also in all other aspects of life. His biography encapsulates the principal features of a Transnational American Studies approach, beginning with his birth in the multiethnic constitution of the state of Hawai’i as a biracial child of an American mother from Kansas and an African father from Kenya, experiencing formative years in the Muslim Indonesian capital of Djakarta, pursuing his education in Los Angeles and at Columbia University and engaging in social work for the African American community in South Side Chicago rather than accepting prestigious job offers in New York City. Finally, the reunion with his African siblings in Kenya before entering Harvard Law School completes his transnational formation to represent an academic background and a transcultural network for his 1

Alfred Hornung and Nina Morgan

unusual political career. In addition, Transnational American Studies features prominently in his publications, in which he reviews and discusses the transcultural sources of the Civil Rights Movement and addresses the transnational relations of the United States of America with Africa and Asia (see Hornung 2016). To a certain extent this also applies to his African siblings who complement his transnational agenda in life and work. His sister Auma Obama retells her transcultural life between Kenya, academic education in Germany with a PhD in intercultural German literature and engagement for youth programs in Africa, such as her foundation of Sauti Kuu; likewise, his brother Mark Obama Ndesandjo relates his transcultural journey from Nairobi to his education at Brown and Stanford, and his decision for quitting an IT job in the US for life in Shenzhen, China, giving piano lessons to orphans (see Hornung 2018). To account for these kinds of diversified relations across continents, in which the United States of America plays an important role, the transdisciplinary tools of Transnational American Studies, practiced by scholars based in institutions in different parts of the world, prove to be appropriate means to yield shrewd analyses and innovative insights. This is the guiding principle of The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies. The Journal of Transnational American Studies, founded in 2009 following Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s programmatic vision in her presidential address to the American Studies Association, established a platform for this new approach in the globally changed political arena after 9/11 (see her contribution in this volume). By now and despite its contestation as a new form of exceptionalism (see Herlihy-Mera 2018), Transnational American Studies has become a generally accepted and widely used methodology for research about the United States within and beyond its borders, involving a worldwide community of scholars. As editors of the Journal of Transnational American Studies, we have welcomed the opportunity to invite contributions from around the world to reflect the scope and productivity of a Transnational American Studies approach. Our goal in bringing together this unique and timely collection of essays is to demonstrate the diversity of Transnational American Studies, an emerging field which can be distinguished by its intellectually collaborative as opposed to ideological genesis, its transdisciplinary method, and transnational thinking. The transnational frame of twentyfirst-century scholarship in Transnational American Studies leaves behind the “national” origin of reference as an analytical tool and results in different strategies of analysis and intellectual shifts that together produce an interpretive project less vulnerable to the ideological reproduction characteristic of American Studies’ peculiar form of American Exceptionalism and less confined to a bilateral or hierarchical model. “Transdisciplinarity” is a defining characteristic of Transnational American Studies scholarship that implies a collaborative methodology of different disciplines instead of interdisciplinary approaches that tend to preserve disciplinary boundaries. While all transnational approaches are necessarily comparative, not all comparative scholarship is transnational, nor is all comparative scholarship collaborative in its genesis or gesture. It may be possible to argue that moving from the traditional origins of American Studies as located in the politics of the national we might trace a trajectory moving from the international toward the transnational. Thus we might also observe how international associations of American Studies scholars set the groundwork for Transnational American Studies—as opposed to the US State Department and its agenda-setting role in the history of “American Studies.” In light of that governmental influence however, it is important to observe that while some American Studies scholarship may still be focused on the internality of the USA or may fit well within left-liberal thinking, Transnational American Studies offers a transnational consciousness wherein the organic or even planetary model tends toward invention and away from adherence to a prefabricated politicized paradigm. Therefore readers should expect from Transnational American Studies the unexpected—different 2

Introduction

intellectual insights, as well as sympathies with other approaches: “Hemispheric American Studies” (de-centering and regional as opposed to national); “Black Atlantic” (racializing geography, spatial); “Red Atlantic” (revisionist history); Archepelagic, Transoceanic & Island Studies (denationalizing, migration, ecological, indigenous, and/or environmentally directed). No doubt there is politics in Transnational American Studies, but it is not “a” politics. What questions do the synchronicities of transnational inquiries produce? This open question is indicative of the manner in which Transnational American Studies is less a destinational form of inquiry with a defined political agenda at which readers should arrive in unison and agreement than it is a tactical shifting of perspective and juxtaposition, more suggestive of thinking of space differently, such as in collaborations like “deep maps” (“DPMPs”) known as “Digital Palimpsest Mapping Projects” (Fishkin 2011) or in experimental literary forms like Craig Santos Perez’s “poemaps” (see Knighton in this volume). Based on Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s exemplification of collaboration in American Studies from the launching of Transnational American Studies in 2004 and its application in collaborative projects, such as the transnational Mark Twain or the Chinese Railroad Workers at Stanford, the contributions to this volume are arranged in five sections, displaying the innovative potential and wide appeal of this approach. The first section, “Theorizing Transnational American Studies,” offers several new perspectives from different parts of the world to understand the conception and position of America in its colonial origin and contemporary constellations. From an Antipodean perspective, “the key question for transnationalism was not so much cultural identity or autonomy, but how different cultures intersected with one another in complex and sometimes perplexing ways” (Giles). For a new evaluation of the colonial situation Martin Heidegger’s “notion of worlding offers a new field imaginary for Transnational American Studies.” Such a worlding approach addresses “multiple entanglements and modes of co-agency—persons, texts, things—while constantly shifting its centers,” including a de-centering of the United States in comparative analyses (Scheiding). The Archipelagic American Studies approach proposes such a shift of perspective with reference to Édouard Glissant’s Caribbean island position that suggests a move away from assumptions based on continental positionings to a “transregional view” of “decontinentalized insularity” (Roberts). In turn, Edward Said’s call, shortly before his death, for an “‘American humanism’ that could draw on the polyglot and multicultural fabric of US culture” can be seen as a form of Transnational American Studies. With reference to his portrayal of Palestinians in After the Last Sky (Said 1999) Said juxtaposes the American “worldliness” with the Palestinian “worldlessness” (Karavanta). Similar reconfigurations along transnational lines emerge in the transformation of Asian American Studies and the adoption of the term of transpacific. Recognizing the Asia/Pacifc region “as a complex, multilateral and polycentric network of interconnections” reconceptionalizes the uneven power relations of US imperialism and domination “while pushing past fixed binaries and rigid hierarchies” (Nessly). The second section, “Culture and Performance: Histories and Reciprocities,” focuses on the idea of performance in the form of cultural re-enactments or in theatrical stagings with transnational sites and audiences. Thus the cultural performances of the First of August as Emancipation Day and its celebration in Rochester, New York, in 1848, which commemorates the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies in 1838, can resonate with the 2017 Liberation Day anniversary at the Flossenbuerg Concentration Camp Memorial in Germany as well as a nearby German-American entertainment fair on the American army barracks in Grafenwoehr. Over and above the political impetus of these cultural enactments (see Butler), which are the subject of a Performance Studies approach, this method also “captures the impact of spaces characterized by small transnationalisms on everyday 3

Alfred Hornung and Nina Morgan

behavior;” hence “Eating Bratwurst and eating burgers become transnational acts” (Bauridl / Wiegmink). The epistemological component of performances also figures prominently in the enactment of the Barbary captivity experience in early American plays. Contrary to the monolingual and triumphalist nature of the national narrative of the Barbary Wars, American playwrights “were able to appropriate the stage in order to challenge masculinist notions about race and gender and drive home strong liberal messages about the indivisible human right to freedom.” This form of revisionary reading ties in with counter-narratives, that have set in after 9/11 to “highlight the complex socio-economic structures of pre-colonial North African polities and their troubled relations with the United States and European powers beyond the reductive and recycled slogans of being piratical and terror-sponsoring states” (Bejjit). An equally cross-cultural dimension informs Indigenous performances of installations by a Cambodian artist at the Documenta in Kassel, Germany, or Native North American plays performed in different parts of the world. Although the application of the transnational to Indigenous works is critical and has to be reconceptualized along “categories of time, epistemology, and ethical commitment,” transnationalism, nevertheless, is “a conditio sine qua non of Indigenous American Studies,” stipulating an “understanding of trans/national coexistence, in spatial, temporal, and epistemological terms” (Däwes). In a further step, Allen’s coinage of “trans-indigenous” generates new geographical names, such as Abiayala for the American continent, which create new cultural spaces for performances. The Medellín Festival provides the forum for the performance of poetry by Indigenous women which forms part of “literary networks that ground the local and the global, Indigenous nationalism and transnationalism, [and] multilingualism.” The public readings and analyses “reflect the need for translation and bilanguaging—practices critical to the building of trans-indigènitude in the twenty-first century” (Chacón). The global dimension of performance is pervasive in the field of sound studies, based on the physical presence of interpreters or recording technologies, which represent an “important channel of transnational exchange and circulation.” In the 1870s, the Jubilee Singers from Fisk University traveled to Europe, Asia, and Africa to bring African American spirituals to the world; recording technologies enabled the transposition of vodou from Haiti to Florida in the 1990s or allowed for the re-enactment of Michael Jackson’s musical performance by Filipino prisoners as a rehabilitative program. In all of these transnational cultural performances the reference to “America” is made, remade and unmade (Kim). In the third section, “Translating Texts and Transnationalizing Contexts,” the designation of “American” or “America” takes on a relational status within a network of authors, texts, and their place of residence. The concept of translation refers to linguistic renditions of source texts in other languages, but it also implies the interaction of different cultures and their representations. In this sense, translation has an affinity with the transnational, and translators become transnational figures, as do the authors and their readers. The proximity to Edgar Allan Poe and his un-American position, felt by the exiled Venezuelan writer Juan Pérez Bonalde and the exiled Cuban José Martí in the 1880s in New York and expressed in their translation of “The Raven,” did not only contribute to Poe’s important influence on Spanish America, but also opened up a transnational space for multiple transcultural interactions with political implications (Esplin). The Jesuit Latin translation of the Chinese philosopher Confucius (Paris, 1687) and its translation into English serves as a cross-cultural hermeneutics between China and Europe, and reaches all the way to the American Colonies, influencing the Enlightenment and the American Founding Fathers, recovered in Ezra Pound’s Cantos and twentieth-century translation of Confucius for the innovation of modern literature (Hornung). The political nature of translation becomes a significant field of Cold War cultural politics during the American occupation of Japan. This re-educational contact 4

Introduction

between two nations turns into an intercultural exchange after 1952 with the institution of Japanese Studies centers at American universities and the transformation of the “cultural Cold Warrior” Edward Seidensticker into a transcultural mediator in his ennobling translation of Kawabata Yasumari’s romance Snow Country, which earned the author the Nobel Prize for literature (Ochi). The Chinese-European Winnifred Eaton, born in Montreal, calls herself Eurasian and adopts the Japanese penname of Onoto Watanna for her Japanese romances. From a transnational perspective, her classic A Japanese Nightingale, for which she uses many Japanese sources and combines “diverse materials from different trends of Orientalism to recreate her imaginary Japan,” challenges the claim that “she was a sheer copier of male literary Japonisme” (Uzawa). The correlation of transnationalism and gender, implicit in Watanna’s life and work, comes to the fore in studying missionary teaching of American women, such as Laura Haygood in China. Such a gendered Transnational American Studies with intersectional dimensions shifts “a US-situated, male-gendered manufacturing workforce to more transnational female service industries” and links transnational feminism to human rights movements, migration and associated cross-cultural experiences (Robbins). The intersection of gender and transnationalism also informs the evocation of Ethiopanism in African American works since the Early Republic. At the turn of the last century, Pauline Hopkins becomes a conscious voice of black transnationalism, most explicit in her novel Of One Blood, in which “Ethiopia is the geographical, ancestral, and cultural center of transAtlantic black identity” (West). Cultural translations between Canada, the US, England, and Spain provide for another intersection of gender and transnationalism in the exercise of “autocritography” (Gates 1992). The examination of the interrelation of literary critic Susan Gubar with the writers Margaret Atwood, Virginia Woolf and Rosa Montero on the basis of their life writings seen as a form of criticism also establishes autobiography as a transnational genre (Durán). “Transnational Images of the Political,” the volume’s fourth section, begins with Udo Hebel, whose work on “interpictoriality” offers Transnational American Studies a concept that is “particularly well-suited to make Transnational American Studies explorations of national and transnational American narratives and their political, social, economic, and cultural implications interact with the concerns of Art History and Visual Culture Studies with iconographic conventions, traditions, and archives.” His chapter provides readers with the historical background and theoretical basis to grasp new interpretations of iconic US representations from presidential portraits to highway signs, tracing their transnational allusions and historical implications. Literal images or the image of what is quintessentially American that circulate globally speak to the way the dissemination of representation has a role in the development of power and identity. Following the logic of interpictoriality, Karsten Fitz considers how US politicians’ public lives are framed by discourses and representational forms that impart images of personal qualities supposedly informed by private life—a noticeable trend, Fitz contends, transnationally impacting the European political sphere. Reframing the history of great figures, such as US President Abraham Lincoln, in the context of his image in the eyes of activists in African nations, historian and JTAS editor Kevin Gaines reveals in his chapter, “Lincoln in Africa” that in the period of the 1930s through the 1960s “young African nationalists would find inspiration in Lincoln’s life for their aspirations for self-determination.” From the educational institutions that bore his name to the Ghanian stamps that bore his image, what sustained the African idea of the American emancipator of black populations in the imaginations (and campaigns) of African politicians was more useful than truthful, as residual optimism faded in the face of Civil Rights’ unrest and violence. Likewise, Nina Morgan, in “Laws of Forgiveness: Obama, Mandela, Derrida,” explores (through three 5

Alfred Hornung and Nina Morgan

figures tied to Africa) the role of the political autobiography and the politics of archival memory, by examining textual representations of Obama and Mandela, the Derridean analysis of archives, “organized amnesia,” and the rise of racism today. As a long-standing Americanist teaching in the Netherlands, Rob Kroes, in his “Visual Intertextuality and Transnational American Studies: Revisiting American Exceptionalism” thoughtfully reimagines Obama’s use of the term “American exceptionalism” and suggests that the intuitive intellect tends toward the transnational, as if by nature. Kroes’ sense of the intertext of the open mind or the transnational thinker clearly points to the example of Obama as a leader with a transnational consciousness. Sebastian Herrmann’s chapter “Post-truth = post-narrative?” explores how national politics traditionally produces a narrative structure, which is now in crisis, as a “toolbox of memes” hammers the political stage, and “the new right populism on both sides of the Atlantic embraces incoherence and discontinuity to an extent that tests (and transgresses) the boundaries of narrative as a symbolic form.” How, Herrmann asks, does the transnational mobility of memes participate in the rise of right-wing populism? Liam Kennedy in “American Realities: Making Sense of Trump” reconsiders how scholars outside the US should approach the field, recommending that “[w]e need to consider fresh ways of looking at ‘America’ as an object of knowledge” in the name of the current “pivotal point of paradigm change,” but also in light of the historical amnesia characteristic of US society; the chapter suggests that such reflecting on the US has Europe looking back at itself as well, hence rethinking “America” is a transnational project involving mutual projection. In the final section, “Remapping Geographies and Genres” the volume takes up questions of space, time, and form. What is the relationship of form to place when we are thinking transnationally—and when forms travel, is the effect of their mobility radicalizing? How is a particular geographic space transformed by genre, and can that transformation impact the identity of the locale, across spaces and time? In “The Performance of American Popular Culture: Rhetoric and Symbolic Forms in American Western Movies” Boris Vejdovsky analyses the “Western” as a symbolic form: “not only has cinema ensured that the U.S. cultural presence has been on a par with its economic and military presence on the world stage, but the Western has also played a major role in the transnational dissemination of the symbolic forms of U.S. culture”; furthermore, he argues, while the Western might seem to depict the past, “Westerns do not only evoke a time and a place in a way that is biased by hegemonic ideology: they create the time and place they appear to simply evoke.” This intriguing aspect of the techne of cinema and ideology together works transnationally, mobilizing both a geography and a global repertoire of ideas that circulate in a form and style under the peculiar auspices of “the Western” as a quintessential genre of American popular culture. Interestingly, this force is not confined to art alone, as Jennifer Reimer suggests in her chapter, “Border Encounters: Theorizing the US-Mexico Border as Transa,” observing how the term “transa” captures and collapses both the transnational and what is transgenre. Although Reimer is careful not to idealize transa as metaphor nor to overtly abstract the very real material conditions of border lives, she suggests addressing “transa as a metaphor for cultural production of and from the borderlands not to contain them within neat theoretical concepts, but to more fully inhabit them and enliven them with the potentially radicalizing diversity.” The collaborative projects that Reimer discusses suggest an “approach that theorizes how transactions between the material realities of the US-Mexico borderlands and innovative aesthetics (form) produce experimental, transnational cultural texts.” In accordance with such new forms and texts, new alliances are possible in Transnational American Studies not by making all borders disappear as some misreadings of transnationalism foretell, but by focusing specifically on how borderlands, walls, and contested zones can become 6

Introduction

shared terrain in the fight against colonialism and racism. As Denijal Jegic´ says in his chapter, “Transnational and Intersectional Implications of Intifada,” in which he reads the poetry of June Jordan alongside the history of Black Activism in the US and Palestinian resistance in Gaza: In order to grasp the potential of artist-activist work, and in order to expand the decolonial discourse, Transnational American Studies needs to combine the analysis of political, economic, and military components of transnational hegemony with the highlighting of counter-hegemonic articulations of resistance. Mary Knighton examines an excellent example of this strategy in her chapter, “Guam, UnInc.; or, Craig Santos Perez’s Transterritorial Challenge to American Studies as Usual” which reads Perez’s work—“joint projects in poetry and activism”—in tandem with a refusal to support binaries that displace aesthetic expression as outside the political and a refusal to accept the silence to which Americanists have thus far relegated Guam. Like the work that Jegic´ sees in June Jordan’s transnational poetry, Knighton understands Perez’s linguistic and political activism in a Guam that is “not simply a victim of the US, Japan’s, and Spain’s colonial predations”—here, the time and space is part of the response that “a new generation on Guam” pursues. As Perez’s poems seek to reposition Guam, so do Hsuan Hsu and Bryan Yazell who address in their introduction of the concept of “structural appropriation” geographies of disaster and “environmental collapse” by comparing the “temporal and spatial dimensions of US, postcolonial, and Indigenous post-apocalyptic narratives”—a juxtapositioning that reveals very different imaginings of the experience and meaning of apocalypse. As Takayuki Tatsumi affirms, these efforts to capture and “comprehend the potential of the post-hemispheric transnational imagination” require an extensive understanding of the conceptualizations of space and time—complex renderings such as those seen in the thinking represented by Gretchen Murphy’s (2005) “Hemispheric Imaginings,” Wai Chee Dimock’s (2006) “Deep Time,” and Yunte Huang’s (2008) “Transpacific Imagination.” Tatsumi lays the backdrop to his analysis of Faulkner and the Japanese writers who were influenced by him by unfurling the early thoughts from a draft of the Declaration of Independence and tracing a line of thinking from the early Americans and the Monroe Doctrine to Trump’s transpacific agenda. Transnational American Studies—as the reading of these chapters exemplifies—is a tour de force involving different arenas, continents, and disciplines, advancing our knowledge of the ineluctable allure of “America” in the world—an allure that is not uncritical. The expanse of the Transnational American Studies testifies also to the fact that it is not an American invention. It owes itself to the many and diverse interests and relationships of the transnational scholars who have studied near and far and, most often, together.

Note 1 Delivered on July 17, 2018 in Johannesburg on the topic of “Renewing the Mandela Legacy and Promoting Active Citizenship in a Changing World.” (Obama 2018).

Bibliography Allen, Chadwick. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2015.

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Alfred Hornung and Nina Morgan Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Deep Maps: A Brief for Digital Palimpsest Mapping Projects (DPMPs, or Deep Maps).” JTAS 3. 2 (2011). Gates, Henry Louis. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey. After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism. New York: Routledge, 2018. Hopkins, Pauline. Of One Blood. New York: Washington Square Press, 2004. Hornung, Alfred, ed. Obama and Transnational American Studies. Heidelberg: Winter, 2016. Hornung, Alfred. “Intercultural, Transcultural, Transnational America and the Obama Family.” Perspektiven der Interkulturalität: Forschungsfelder eines umstrittenen Begriffs. Eds. Anton Escher and Heike C. Spickermann. Heidelberg: Winter, 2018. 235–251. Huang, Yunte. Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Morgan, Nina. “‘Laws of Forgiveness’: Mandela, Obama, Derrida.” Obama and Transnational American Studies. Ed. Alfred Hornung. Heidelberg: Winter, 2016. 391–415. Murphy, Gretchen. Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Obama, Barack H. “2018 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture.” Johannesburg, South Africa, July 17, 2018. www.nelsonmandela.org. Said, Edward. After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Watanna, Otono. A Japanese Nightingale. London: Archibald Constable & Co Ltd, 1904.

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1 COLLABORATION IN TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Introduction I embarked on my first collaborative venture in Transnational American Studies in response to being verbally attacked in public in Southwestern China in 2005 by a US government official who had helped bring me there. In retrospect, I ought to thank him. The success of the project that this unexpected event ended up setting in motion prompted me to develop a stimulating and exciting research agenda over the next decade and beyond in which transnational collaboration has been front and center. I’ve never looked back. But looking back right now strikes me as a fruitful thing to do. This chapter describes the genesis of that first transnational collaboration, and of three subsequent collaborative ventures in Transnational American Studies that I was prompted to propose as a result of that positive experience: a distinctive journal, a unique anthology, and an ambitious research project that now involves over 100 scholars across North America and Asia. I will close by considering some of the challenges collaboration can present, by sharing some current transnational collaborations other scholars are developing, and by reflecting on why collaboration is so central to Transnational American Studies. June, 2005. George W. Bush was president, the Iraq War was raging, and the administration was in the habit of charging anyone who criticized it with being a “traitor.” As President of the American Studies Association, I had been invited to give keynote talks at national American Studies Conferences in China, Japan, and Korea. The theme of the conference in China, held in Yunnan University in Kunming, was “America at War and at Peace.” My talk, which I titled “Wars of Words: American Writers and War,” surveyed a century of anti-war writing in America from Mark Twain’s “The War-Prayer” (1905) to Calvin Trillin’s 2004 poems on the Iraq War (Fishkin 2005). I included discussions of work by John Dos Passos, e. e. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway, Dalton Trumbo, Langston Hughes, Tim O’Brien, and Bob Dylan, among others—as well as other writing by Twain, such as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic Brought Down to Date,” “As Regards Patriotism,” and other pieces he wrote in response to the Philippine-American War. I noted that the Mark Twain who wrote these pieces was blowing the whistle on the lies his government told him not because he was a traitor, but because he genuinely loved his country and felt betrayed by it. I argued that “The War-Prayer” laid down the tracks for the century of anti-war writing that followed. 9

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When I finished my speech the Chinese scholars who filled the auditorium applauded enthusiastically. But then something unprecedented happened. An American official from the US embassy in Beijing, who had been sitting in the back of the room, demanded to be given time at the podium immediately. His request was granted. He then proceeded to attack me. (Keep in mind not only that embassy officials are not supposed to intervene directly in this way in scholarly conferences they support—but also that this official had greenlighted my plane ticket.) He proceeded to argue heatedly that although my comments had focused solely on antiwar writing by Americans, many American writers recognized that there were times when “you had to go after the bad guys—like Ho Chi Minh” (a comment that was perhaps imprudent given that this academic conference on war and peace was taking place just about 200 miles from the Vietnamese border). With an anger that was palpable, he then proceeded to list the names of American writers who had been in favor of various wars—writers whose names were as unfamiliar to me as they were to the Chinese scholars in the audience. He left as soon as he’d said his piece. At lunch afterwards, the Chinese scholars with whom I spoke were not surprised at what had just transpired: I had incurred the displeasure of a government official with my remarks, so he attacked me. “That’s what governments do,” they said; “Our government does it, your government does it – nothing unusual here.” When the State Department spends thousands of dollars to fly the President of the American Studies Association to an American Studies conference in China, it was understood to be following the tradition of soft diplomacy that sent Americans abroad to exercise their free speech in public as a way of modeling the freedom that America gave its citizens. But clearly my remarks had pushed my sponsor’s buttons, leading him to behave just the way the Chinese expected their government to behave. What made him so angry? A colleague of his later described him to me as being “to the right of Attila the Hun,” but something more than politics seemed to be going on. As I pondered that question on my flight to Kansai International Airport later that day, I suspected that it was my having put Mark Twain at the head of the procession. When the official had paid for my flight to attend the conference that Yunnan University had invited me to keynote, he knew I was a Mark Twain scholar, and probably figured I was “safe.” What could be more American than a talk about Mark Twain? But he clearly had never read “The War-Prayer” and it upset him greatly. Lots of people had never read “The WarPrayer” or the other obscure pieces of passionate, eloquent outrage by Twain that I’d discussed. I found myself musing, what if these writings by Twain had not been suppressed and ignored for so much of the twentieth century? What if Twain’s critiques of imperialism and of his government’s arrogant abuse of power had been front and center in our classrooms all these years? How might American history and world history in the twentieth century have been different if “The War-Prayer” had been as familiar to every high school student as Tom Sawyer? If we had made discussions of these texts central, not peripheral, to American classrooms, might we have been more prepared to remind those who called critics of the Bush administration “traitors” that criticizing your country when you knew it to be wrong was as American as Mark Twain? I was still shaken by the morning’s events when I arrived in Kyoto later that day for the annual conference of the Japanese Association of American Studies. Soon after I arrived, I attended a reception held by the Japan Mark Twain Society. I had long admired the vibrant community of Mark Twain scholars in Japan, and had agreed to contribute to and serve on the editorial board of the English-language journal, Mark Twain Studies, that the Society had launched the previous year, in 2004. I reconnected with Takayuki Tatsumi, a professor of 10

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American literature at Keio University (and editor of the new journal) whom I had met on an earlier visit to Japan. He could tell that I was upset about something. I told him what had happened in Kunming. As it turned out, “The War-Prayer” was on Takayuki’s mind, as well, since he was in the process of writing a paper for an international literature conference to be held the following spring in Nagoya; it was about postmodern writers’ use of black humor in their efforts to narrate post-apocalyptic reality in the wake of fatal disaster, and it began by invoking “The War-Prayer” as an important precursor to these efforts. We agreed that too few people had read “The War-Prayer,” and too few scholars had written about it. What could we do to change that? Might an international forum on “The War-Prayer” in Mark Twain Studies play a role in prompting broader discussion and debate? We respected each other’s scholarship, breadth of interests, editorial judgment, political vision, and sense of humor, and welcomed the opportunity to work together on such a project. The collaboration was as pleasurable as it was fruitful. We circulated a call for papers, and submissions immediately began filling our inboxes. The international forum that came out in Mark Twain Studies in 2006 included 26 short essays by scholars based in the US and Japan from the fields of English, History, American Studies, Religious Studies, Comparative Literature, Ethnic Studies, Philosophy, and Sociology/Anthropology––as well as a Twain biographer, a poet and artist born in Vietnam, an independent scholar, a novelist, a rare book collector, and a stand-up political comic. One of the most insightful and moving meditations on “The War-Prayer” was by Makoto Nagawara, a justly celebrated Japanese Twain scholar who was also a survivor of Hiroshima (Fishkin and Tatsumi 2006, 7–118). Readers found the transnational forum fresh and stimulating, and orders for that issue of the journal, which was available only in print, began pouring in. The positive experience I had collaborating with Takayuki Tatsumi on this project helped prepare me to embrace with excitement the next opportunity for transnational collaboration that presented itself. May, 2007. I was invited to give a talk on Asian crossroads in Transnational American Studies to students at UC-Santa Barbara by professor Shirley Geok-lin Lim (Fishkin 2006). At lunch at the faculty club before the talk Shirley and I found ourselves commiserating about the challenges of building a genuinely global community of scholars working in Transnational American Studies. We were both aware of valuable articles on transnational topics that had had trouble finding a home in existing journals and agreed that it would be great to have a journal that defined its mandate as publishing just such pieces. But the obstacles were daunting. Colleagues in financially-strapped institutions outside the US often found it hard to keep up with new work in the field since their libraries couldn’t afford subscriptions to the key journals or buy the latest books; how would they be able to afford a subscription to yet another new journal, no matter how helpful it was to their work? Even scholars in the US had trouble accessing relevant work published in small-circulation international journals that existed only in hard copy—such as Mark Twain Studies (which required anyone who wanted to buy a copy of an issue to mail an international postal money order to Japan). An open-access digital journal would be ideal, we mused. But the prospect of actually launching such a journal was beyond us. If only we knew someone with the programming skills willing to help us on a pro bono basis figure out how to create a digital journal. It was a nice daydream. At the talk I gave that afternoon, Shirley’s students were lively and engaged and we had a stimulating discussion. They were clearly hungry for more opportunities to both read and publish articles in Transnational American Studies, and to have more ways of interacting with like-minded scholars outside the US. Shirley and I brought up the absence of any online, 11

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open-access peer-reviewed journal focused on this area, and jokingly asked whether anyone in the room had the programming skills to create one. The students—smart and interesting, but trained in the humanities rather than computer science—ruefully shook their heads. After the discussion we adjourned for dinner that night at Shirley’s home. Over dinner, one of those students, Eric Martinsen, had an inspired idea: he told us, to our surprise, that the University of California system already had in place a free electronic platform for hosting journals: the eScholarship Repository which was part of the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library. The roughly two-dozen journals the initiative hosted at the time were all in the sciences or the social sciences. But Eric had read the fine print: there was nothing to prevent a humanities journal from using the platform as well. Caroline Kyungah Hong, who, like Eric, was a graduate student at UCSB at the time, was enthusiastic, as well. The seeds of the Journal of Transnational American Studies were planted that night. Caroline and Eric, now tenured faculty themselves, became JTAS’s first managing editors. Over the next year and a half, Shirley and I recruited an international board of editors who helped us circulate a Call for Papers, recruit articles, assemble an international advisory board, and shape a new online open-access journal cosponsored by UCSB’s American Cultures and Global Contexts Center and Stanford’s American Studies Program. The founding editors were based in Canada, Germany, Japan, and the US. In addition to Shirley and myself, the group included Alfred Hornung (Obama Institute, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz), Nina Morgan (Kennesaw State University), Greg Robinson (Université du Québec à Montréal), and Takayuki Tatsumi (Keio University). The advisory board included scholars based in countries including Australia, China, Czech Republic, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Russia, Taiwan, the UK, and the US (and soon after included scholars from Argentina, India, and Morocco). We encouraged fellow editors and advisory board members to come up with ideas on how to make the journal into a distinctive home for fresh border-crossing, multi-disciplinary scholarship in American Studies focused on transnational topics. Advisory Board member David Bradley (then at the University of Oregon) came up with the inspired suggestion of having a section of the journal called “Reprise,” which would reprint important articles in Transnational American Studies that had appeared in print in books or journals but that had never had an online life. Nina Morgan agreed to edit the Reprise section. The first issue’s Reprise section reprinted the International Forum on “The War-Prayer” that had been almost impossible for readers outside Japan to access previously. Several of us thought about how useful it would be to colleagues both in the US and around the world to run excerpts from soon-to-be-published or recently-published books. Greg Robinson agreed to edit this feature of the journal, which we called the “Forward” section. We liked the idea of having guest editors solicit articles on particular themes, but hesitated to devote entire issues to these special topics; Takayuki Tatsumi reminded us of the category of “Special Forum” that the Japanese journal Mark Twain Studies had developed—the category, in fact, in which our international forum on “The War-Prayer” appeared. With Herculean effort on the part of graduate students at UC Santa Barbara and Stanford, as well as the editorial board and advisory board, The Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) was launched in 2009.1 Over the past nine years, The Journal of Transnational American Studies has published close to over 300 pieces of scholarship by individuals based in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Morocco, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, the UK and the US. These included 148 peer-reviewed articles, excerpts from 84 recently-published or soonto-be published books and articles, and 66 outstanding articles or book chapters that had 12

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been previously available in hard copy only. Special Forums were devoted to “Circa 1898: Overseas Empire and Transnational American Studies;” “Charting Transnational Native American Studies: Aesthetics, Politics, Identity;” “Revolutions and Heterotopias;” “American Studies: Caribbean Edition;” “Sweden and America; ” “La Floride française: Florida, France, and the Francophone World;” and “Disrupting Globalization: Transnationalism and American Literature.” JTAS is one of the relatively small number of born-digital journals selected for preservation by the Library of Congress. Collaboration has been key to the journal’s success. The founding editors had previously had experience editing journals, book series, and multi-authored works in five countries on three continents; the group included fluent speakers of five languages; and each of us had experience lecturing or teaching in universities in countries outside our own. We were trained in American Studies, literature, history, popular culture, and women’s studies. We brought our awareness of the culture of the academy in a range of national settings to our shared endeavor, as well as our contacts in different academic communities. Each of us moved in different overlapping intellectual circles, helping us cast a broad net for contributors and reviewers. Caroline Hong and Eric Martinsen, the founding managing editors, did a stellar job of recruiting global peer reviewers for the submissions, with members of the global advisory board pitching in on that effort as well. The editorial board reads every submission that passes peer review before it is published. During the last two years, we have expanded the team to include new associate managing editors and editors with broad-ranging expertise and cultural competencies, along with a deep interest in transnational topics and a commitment to collaboration. In terms of interdisciplinarity, JTAS has featured work by contributors who teach in and/ or were trained in African and African American Studies; American Indian Studies; American Studies; Anthropology; Arts and Cultural Studies; Asian American Studies; Asian Studies; Communication; Comparative Literature; Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity; Crime and Justice Studies; Education; English; Environmental Humanities; English for Speakers of Other Languages; Ethnic Studies; Film; Foreign Languages; French and Francophone Studies; Gender Studies; German; Historical Archaeology; History; History of Science; Indonesian Studies; Journalism; Latin American and Iberian Studies; Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies; Law; Literature; Media and Cultural Studies; North American Studies; Philosophy; Political Science; Religious Studies; Sexuality Studies; Spanish and Portuguese; Sociology; Theatre Studies; Theatre, Film and Television; Visual and Cultural Studies; Urban Studies; and Women’s Studies in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia/ Oceania. The scope of all interdisciplinary journals extends beyond the body of knowledge any one editor has; in a global interdisciplinary journal focused on transnational topics, there is an even more pressing need for the editorial team to draw on a broad spectrum of in-depth knowledge. A collaborative effort like JTAS could not have existed before email made global communication a simple endeavor. Having a working editorial board made up of scholars based in Atlanta, Hong Kong, Ithaca, Mainz, Palo Alto, Oakland, Montreal, New York, Santa Barbara, and Tokyo turns out to be an insomniac’s dream: whatever hour of the day or night one wants to have a stimulating online conversation, a colleague is likely to be up and about and answering email on some continent or other. And while email may have enabled JTAS to be born, the friendships forged through the collaboration have sustained the journal and helped it thrive, and also helped give rise to other collaborative ventures, like the two discussed below. Various subsets of editorial board members, managing editors and associate 13

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managing editors, advisory board members, contributors and reviewers have connected in person annually at JTAS receptions held at American Studies Association annual meetings, and at other conferences in the US, Europe, and Asia. July, 2008. I was pleasantly surprised to receive a phone call from Max Rudin, publisher of the Library of America, inviting me to edit a Mark Twain anthology of great writers on his life and works to appear in time for the 2010 centennial of Twain’s death. The Library of America had recently published a volume like this in connection with Abraham Lincoln. I was intrigued by the idea and said yes—although at the time I had little sense of the shape such a book would take. I had a general idea of some of the key essays I’d want in the book—including pieces that I’d commissioned for the Oxford Mark Twain from David Bradley, E.L. Doctorow, Hal Holbrook, Erica Jong, Ursula Le Guin, Toni Morrison, Gore Vidal, and Kurt Vonnegut.2 But ever since my presidential address to the American Studies Association in 2004, in which I had chided colleagues for neglecting American Studies scholarship published outside the US (Fishkin 2005b, 36)3 I found myself wondering whether there might be essays by great writers from around the world responding to Twain over the years that remained unknown to Twain scholars in the US. I knew that he had been popular in Germany from the nineteenth century to the present. When I had lectured in Paris at L’École Normale Supérieure in the 1990s, Huckleberry Finn was on a list of required texts for national exams. And I had read that Twain had been important to both Kenzaburo- Oe of Japan and Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina, but I had never read anything by either of these writers on the topic. I decided to look into writing on Twain in languages other than English from outside the United States. My past positive experiences with collaboration helped persuade me that if I was fortunate enough to locate interesting material that wasn’t in English, I’d be able to find colleagues willing to work with me to make them available to English-speaking readers. To my amazement, I seemed to have opened a door to dozens of secret chambers— passageways whose very existence astonished me. Previously untranslated texts that I selected for the book included essays by Nobel laureates from Denmark and Japan, by two of Cuba’s most prominent public intellectuals, by Argentina’s most celebrated author, by one of China’s most famous modern authors, by a major Russian poet, and by respected writers from Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Soviet Union—as well as an article from a Yiddish newspaper in Vilna that was a poignant reminder of the vibrant intellectual culture that once thrived in Yiddish-speaking communities in Eastern Europe. These texts were just a fraction of the material that I could have included, material which had largely been consigned to oblivion by the monolingual biases of American literary scholars. It turned out that prominent writers from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, writing in Chinese, Danish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish, had all engaged Twain. But aside from a handful of excerpts, the pieces they wrote were unavailable in English (Fishkin 2010).4 I uncovered many of these pieces through bibliographic digging—and the able assistance of Mary-Louise Munill in Stanford’s interlibrary loan division. But although I could read the pieces in Spanish and French, I was sure I was still missing a lot; and the pieces in these other languages remained largely opaque to me. Collaboration was key to realizing the vision of bringing these texts into conversations about Twain that take place in English.5 Colleagues on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Transnational American Studies helped me network to translators around the world and in some cases translated pieces I’d identified themselves. For example, I was startled to discover that the first book devoted to Mark Twain anywhere was published in Paris—in French—in 1884; JTAS editor Greg Robinson 14

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translated selections from that book (which was written by Henry Gauthier-Villars, later best known as the infamous first husband of the writer Colette, whom he married some years after his book on Twain was published) (Gauthier-Villars 2010). He also translated work on Twain by the nineteenth-century French writer Thèrése Bentzon—a piece that Twain had read in French and been infuriated by (although it looked to me as if his anger had been somewhat unwarranted) (Bentzon 2010). Nina Yermakov Morgan (with her colleague Katya Vladimirov) translated a piece by Abel Startsev, a leading Soviet philologist whom I had met in the 1990s and who had given me a book he had written in Russian about Twain (Startsev 2010) she also connected me to Patricia Thompson Rizzo at the University of Padua, who provided a translation of a piece by Italian writer Livia Bruni (Bruni 2010). Alfred Hornung introduced me to Valerie Bopp, an advanced student of his in Mainz, who translated two pieces by the great nineteenth-century expert on the German language, Edouard Engel (Engel 2010a, 2010b). Shirley Geok-lin Lim introduced me to her friend Edward M. Test, who translated a previously untranslated column José Martí had written describing a reading he heard Mark Twain give in New York on the eve of the publication of Huckleberry Finn, as well as a piece by Cuban satirist Jesús Castellanos and one by the Spanish novelist Angél Guerra (Martí 2010a, Castellanos 2010; Guerra 2010). JTAS Advisory Board members were extremely helpful, as well. Lu Xun, widely viewed as the father of modern Chinese literature, wrote a preface to the first book-length publication of Mark Twain’s work in Chinese, but it had never been translated into English. JTAS Advisory Board member Gongzhao Li helped me identify this piece, and translated it, as well (Lu 2010). Marina Tsvetaeva, now regarded as one of the best Russian poets of the twentieth century, and a writer who helped carve out new roles for women in the arts in the Soviet Union, had found her poetic aspirations belittled by her family during her childhood; during these stressful years, the family’s set of Mark Twain’s works were key to her escape into the world of the imagination. JTAS Advisory Board member Yuri Tretyakov helped me identify the important poem she wrote about this, and translated it for the book (Tsvetaeva 2010). Stanford colleagues also pitched in, and were a pleasure to work with. As he helped me follow a footnote trail leading to a Yiddish publication that turned out to be dead end, my colleague Zachary Baker, Stanford Library’s curator of Judaica and Hebraica, got curious and began pursuing other references to Twain in Yiddish newspapers. He uncovered two pieces in Tog, a 1924 Yiddish newspaper from Vilna that compared Mark Twain with Sholem Aleichem. They were written by Maks Erik, the pen name of Zalman Merkin a prominent Polish-born literary historian and critic who became known for his groundbreaking history of Yiddish literature and textbooks on Yiddish in the nineteenth century (Erik 2010). He had moved to the Soviet Union under the assumption that Yiddish culture would thrive there. Sadly, he was mistaken. In 1936, during the first wave of persecution of Jewish cultural figures, he was arrested and sent to the gulag, where he died in 1937. Working with Zachary Baker to bring Erik’s extended meditation on the resonances between the work of Mark Twain, and that of the man widely known as the “Yiddish Mark Twain” to an Englishspeaking audience was both fascinating and poignant. But it was the challenges associated with translating another piece on Twain by José Martí that most dramatically underlined for me the importance of collaboration: it took three of us—a Twain scholar (myself), a Cervantes scholar (Rubén Builes, a graduate student in Spanish at Stanford at the time), and a bilingual expert in translation studies and nineteenthand twentieth-century Spanish literature (Stanford faculty member Cintia Santana) to get it right. The three of us met on multiple occasions to decipher and interpret an intriguing article Martí had written for the Buenos Aires paper La Nación in 1890 (Martí 2010b). 15

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A few portions of the piece had been translated into English and published some years back, but it turned out that a translator’s error had rendered those selections nonsensical—a fact which probably accounted for why the piece was virtually unknown. In the one book that presented selections from this piece in English, when Martí discusses a character named “Jin,” the translator, Elinor Randall had translated “Jin” as “Jim,” with a footnote referring to Jim in Huckleberry Finn. But as Rubén, Cintia and I grappled with the piece, it became clear that “Jin” is short for “Jinn” or “Djinn”—a powerful supernatural creature in Islamic and pre-Islamic folkore and literature, discussed at length in the Koran. It was how Martí rather cleverly translated Hank Morgan’s nickname in Camelot in Connecticut Yankee: “the Boss.” Due to centuries of Spanish contact with the Moors, Martí and his Latin American readers would have been more familiar than English speakers with the Arabic tradition of the Djinn—although “genies” (the English translation of “Djinn”) had made their way into English-speaking culture through Arabian Nights, and other popular literature translated from Arabic sources. Martí’s nickname for Hank—“Jin,”—is an especially apt name for a character who awes Camelot with his seemingly supernatural powers. Indeed, I was even more impressed by the appropriateness of Martí’s translation of Hank’s nickname when I recalled Tom’s remark to Huck in Huck Finn that genies “don’t think nothing of pulling a shot-tower up by the roots.” In Connecticut Yankee, of course, “The Boss,” acts very much like the genie Tom describes, when he blasts Merlin’s tower to smithereens. The translator, however, in addition to having mistranslated “Jin” as “Jim,” added a footnote about Huckleberry Finn, ran these comments together with remarks Martí made four years earlier about a reading at which Twain read from Huckleberry Finn, and identified the entire selection with the date of the publication of the first of the two pieces, not the second. All this managed to ensure that Martí’s comments would not be associated with the book to which they actually referred; it made it highly unlikely that English-speaking readers would be aware of the fact that what they were reading was a review of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court that Martí published about a month after the book was published. Since Martí was reading Twain’s satire set in the era of chivalric knight errantry through the lens of a satire by Cervantes also set in the era of chivalric knight errantry (Martí refers to Don Quixote in the first line of his review), it was extremely helpful to have Rubén Builes’ understanding of Cervantes as we tried to grasp the quirks of Martí’s word choice in the essay. Meanwhile, Cintia Santana’s understanding of the ways in which the piece was informed by nineteenth-century Spanish was a great help, as was my own familiarity with Twain’s novel. It was only together that we were able to restore to English-speaking readers an important commentary on Connecticut Yankee which had been redlined from American literary studies until The Mark Twain Anthology published it in English in 2010. The piece is wonderful not only for what it tells us about Twain but also for what it tells us about Martí, who wrote that reading Twain’s book, a book “fueled by indignation,” made him want to meet its author and congratulate him. He recognized that Twain was committed as a writer and as a citizen of a democracy to values that Martí shared: both men rejected the claims of aristocracy to deference and legitimacy; both abhorred injustice; both sympathized with the downtrodden and disempowered; both disdained writing that was pretentious and affected. Martí clearly saw in Twain a kindred spirit (Fishkin 2010, 47–48). Viewing Connecticut Yankee as much more than a satire of medieval chivalry, he recognized it as compelling criticism of contemporary injustice. He wrote that Twain “makes evident—with an anger that sometimes borders on the sublime—the vileness of those who would climb atop their fellow man, feed upon his misery, and drink from his misfortune” (Martí 2010b, 16

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54). Twain “handles his subject with such skill,” Martí writes, that we get much more than scenes that are faithful to that age of kings and bishops, villagers and serfs ... [Instead] a picture emerges of that which is starting to be seen in the United States today: virtuous men who are scourged by whips, armed by nature, with only solitude and hunger, men who go forth with a pen for a lance and a book for a shield to topple the money castles of the new aristocracy. There are paragraphs in Twain’s book that make me want to set off for Hartford to shake his hand. (Martí 2010b, 53–54) Martí clearly saw the author of A Connecticut Yankee as one yankee who dissented from some of the conventional pieties of the exploitative society in which he lived, as Martí himself did. He saw Twain as a writer whose critique of modern society paralleled Martí’s own in important ways. I found the pleasure of grappling with the nuances of translating Martí’s “translation/ interpretation” of Twain with Cintia and Rubén so interesting that I was slightly sad when we had finished the task and the book went to press. The experience ignited my interest in translation studies, and when I was invited to serve on a working group to devise a “Translation Studies” minor at Stanford (a group that involved Cintia, as well), I leapt at the opportunity. Stanford’s “Translation Studies” minor is now going strong. The habits of collaboration with colleagues around the world that working on the Mark Twain Anthology required taught me how stimulating and enjoyable such collaboration can be. It attracted me to a collaborative digital venture involving translation in which I am currently engaged with colleagues at the Université de Lille—Ronald Jenn in Translation Studies and Amel Fraisse in Computer Science (as well as colleagues at Stanford)—in which translations of a key novel of Twain’s around the world will be deployed to develop digital materials for technologically low-resourced languages.6 December, 2011. Stanford University was founded with the fortune that Leland Stanford acquired as an owner of the Central Pacific Railroad, which was built primarily by Chinese workers. When I arrived at Stanford, I had gone to Special Collections and asked to see a letter written by one of these workers. I was surprised to learn that they didn’t have any. I was even more shocked to learn from my colleague, historian Gordon Chang, that no library in the United States had any letter or document of any kind written by a Chinese person who worked on the railroad. Indeed, probing further, I found that relatively little was known about the 12,000 to 15,000 Chinese workers whose labors had done so much to create the institution in which I worked and lived. In December 2011, I invited Gordon out for tea and presented what I called “an opportunity”: 2015 would be the 150th anniversary of the employment of the first large group of Chinese workers on the Central Pacific, and 2019 would be the 150th anniversary of the completion of the first transcontinental railroad. Wasn’t this an opportune time to develop a transnational, multi-disciplinary research project to find out all we could about who these workers were, where they came from, what they did on the railroad, what they did after the railroad’s completion, how they changed the US and China, and how they figure in cultural memory on both sides of the Pacific? Gordon agreed. We persuaded Dongfang Shao, who was then head of the East Asia Library at Stanford, and Evelyn Hu-DeHart, a Stanford alumna who was then head of Ethnic Studies at Brown, to join us as co-organizers of the Project. The four of us conferred in person, on email, and on the phone. We made the case for the importance of the project we were 17

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proposing and sent a letter to Stanford’s acting president (and provost) John Etchemendy, requesting seed money. We were truly delighted when he responded positively, in April 2012, with some funds to help us get started. Gordon Chang and I were designated as the Project’s co-directors. We began developing plans on how to collaborate across borders, disciplines, and languages on a venture that has uncovered an extraordinary body of knowledge about this neglected chapter of the past. We came up with a name: the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford University. From the start, we were convinced that this was a story that needed to be told from both sides of the Pacific. The four of us, aided by Hilton Obenzinger, who became Associate Director of the Project, cast our nets wide, querying scholars we knew in a range of fields across the US and Asia, inviting those interested in being involved to a preliminary workshop at Stanford in September 2012. In early 2013, we received a delegation of scholars and provincial officials from Guangdong, the province from which nearly all of the railroad workers came, and signed a cooperation agreement with them.7 Shortly thereafter we launched the Project’s website: http://web.stanford.edu/group/chineserailroad/cgi-bin/ website/. We developed strategies for mining a broad range of archives in the US and China, digital databases, books, articles, photographs, government records, hearings, and collections of artifacts, and established collaboration agreements with universities including Wuyi University (home of a major Overseas Chinese Research Center) and National Sun Yat-sen University. Stanford Libraries agreed to host the Digital Materials Repository of primary materials we hoped to assemble, and we began working with Stanford undergraduate researchers to identify what should be in it and to enter items into an archiving platform developed at Stanford called Bibliopedia.8 We learned, to our surprise, that although not a single letter from any of the Chinese railroad workers has yet surfaced in either the US or China, historical archaeologists in the US had recovered thousands of pieces of their rice bowls, gaming pieces, food containers, opium pipes, and other items that they had used. Our Stanford colleague in anthropology, Barbara Voss, created the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project Archaeology Network, in the spring of 2013 and soon had over 60 archaeologists sharing research leads via the listserv she created. We also began trying to track down descendants of Chinese railroad workers to videotape family oral histories. We networked among friends and acquaintances, gave radio and television interviews, spoke at colleges and community groups. Public historian Connie Young Yu and filmmaker Barre Fong were soon conducting multigenerational interviews with grandchildren, great grandchildren, and great great grandchildren of Chinese railroad workers, and the Chinese Historical Society of America partnered with us in our efforts to locate railroad worker descendants. Connie Young Yu directs the Project’s oral histories. In September 2013, Pin-Chia Feng (National Chiao Tung University and Academia Sinica) organized a conference about the Project at the Institute of European and American Studies at Academia Sinica in Taipei that was supported by the National Science Council of Taiwan; the Department of English and Foreign Languages and Literature at National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan; Academia Sinica; and Stanford (as well as a grant the Project received from the American Council of Learned Societies and the CCK Foundation).9 Also that fall, Project member Hsinya Huang (National Sun Yat-sen University) organized a group of some ten to 12 scholars based in Taiwan interested in researching the representation of Chinese railroad workers in North America, and successfully sought funding of their own from the CCK Foundation in Taiwan. (Over the next few years, the Taiwan working group would host several meetings with Stanford scholars and in 2017 would publish a Chineselanguage collection of new research by Project members, 北美鐵路華工：歷史、文學與視 18

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覺再現 [Chinese Railroad Workers in North America: Recovery and Representation], edited by Hsinya Huang.) In October 2013, Barbara Voss organized a workshop at Stanford of historical archaeologists who had worked on Chinese sites along the route of the Central Pacific and other railroads in the American West. (Papers presented at that conference would appear in print in the spring of 2015 in a special issue of the journal Historical Archaeology edited by Barbara Voss) (Voss 2015). In early 2014, members of our team photographed payroll records at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. When I found the only piece of writing that has surfaced yet from one of the Chinese railroad workers—one line in calligraphy in a Central Pacific payroll record—it was wonderful to be able to share it instantly with Chinese-literate colleagues in both the US and Asia, to decipher what it meant. Yuen Ding (Sun Yat-sen University), one of our key collaborators from Guangdong, said he could tell from the nature of the calligraphy that the person who wrote it had been trained as an accountant! We also fanned out to seek documents in small historical societies in Nevada and California, and to mine archives at Stanford, at the Bancroft Library, the Huntington Library, Brigham Young’s Special Collections, and other repositories. In April 2014, the Committee of 100, an organization of prominent Chinese Americans dedicated to advancing understanding between the United States and Asia, honored Stanford University with its Common Ground Award for the Advancement in US-China Relations, noting the significance of Stanford’s Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project.10 In September 2014, Yuan Ding (Sun Yat-sen University) organized an international symposium at Sun Yat-sen university in Guangzhou, on “The North American Chinese Laborers and Guangdong Qiaoxiang Society.” It was followed by a two-day trip to some of the sending villages from which the Chinese railroad workers came, led by Selia Tan (Wuyi University). In June 2015, Stanford co-hosted with the Chinese Historical Society of America (CHSA) “The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental,” a day that brought together scholars who presented their latest research, descendants who shared family stories, and interested members of the public—some 250 people in all. It marked the first time that Stanford had formally honoured the memory of the Chinese whose labors had played such a key role in creating the fortune with which Leland Stanford founded our university. A representative of China, Ambassador Luo Linquan of China spoke at the gathering as did Stanford’s Dean of Humanities and Sciences. The event also featured an exhibit of historical photography curated by Stanford and the CHSA (Chang et al. 2015).11 The press attention that public events like this one garnered inevitably led to additional contacts, research leads, and suggestions.12 We needed to husband our time and our resources, responding to the ideas that seemed most potentially fruitful; but we learned not to be surprised at the unexpected initiatives that found their way to us. For example, we had the opportunity to work with the distinguished Beijing-based photographer Li Ju, who has followed the original Central Pacific Railroad line five times, re-taking in the twenty-first century the original photos taken by railroad photographer Alfred Hart in the 1860s. In November 2015, the Project worked with him to mount a bilingual exhibit of more than 70 frames of historical and contemporary photos called “The Chinese Helped Build the Railroad and the Railroad Built America,” organized by China’s Guangxi Normal University Press, and co-sponsored by Stanford’s American Studies Program and Center for East Asian Studies. This exhibit documenting one of the great engineering achievements of the nineteenth century was held, appropriately, around an atrium in one of Stanford’s main engineering buildings (Wakefield 2015). It is now touring the US. We have also found ourselves 19

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consultants to the development of an oratorio about the railroad workers being written by a composer in China and a Chinese librettist in the United States. But the principal focus of our attention is shepherding new scholarship to publication and creating the open-access Digital Materials Repository that Stanford libraries will host. In April 2016, the Project hosted a working conference at Stanford that brought together scholars from Asia and North America who have done sustained research on some aspect of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America over the last two years, in preparation for books and web-based publications that we plan to publish. There were papers on the transcontinental railroad in global perspective; on who the Chinese labour migrants to the Americas were; on what we know of their life in the villages back in China; on the Hong Kong that the workers had departed from; on how they maintained their health and wellbeing as they built the railroad; on what we know about their 1867 strike; on how their work camps were laid out and what structures they lived in; on what we learn from studying photographs of the workers and their camps; on Chinese railroad workers’ relations with Native Americans; on how the Chinese workers sent remittances back to China; on what their families back in China did with the remittances they received; on how the workers lived and how they died; on the communities they created in the Western United States; on how the Chinese railroad workers in North America have been represented in fiction and drama in English and Chinese; on how they were represented in Chinese historiography and literature; on how they were pictured in magazines; on how they were treated in American history textbooks; on what their descendants went on to do; on what other rail lines they built after the transcontinental was completed, etc. Bringing together researchers from so many different locations and languages and disciplines has its special pleasures: who might have guessed that Greg Robinson, a U.S. historian teaching at the Université de Québec à Montréal would have stumbled upon the only eye-witness account of the 1867 strike as it was happening—written in French, by the uncle of Simone de Beauvoir? And that the prose picture he drew was accompanied by a French illustrator’s dramatic image of what the striking Chinese workers had looked like? The conference was followed by a trip to sites along the railroad route in the Sierra Nevada that the Chinese had built. At both the conference and on the Sierra trip that followed—one could see tangible evidence of the benefits of a collaborative project that was transnational and interdisciplinary. At a Chinese cemetery that included an early twentiethcentury headstone of an individual from Taishan (one of the counties from which many of the railroad workers had come), an American archaeologist shared his thoughts about what the fragments of brown glaze ware that one could see around the graves might have been used for, while a scholar from China shared her thoughts on how the railroad workers may have dealt with the challenge of getting the bones of the dead back to China for reburial. As we drove through small towns along the railroad route, an American historian who was an expert on the Chinese communities that grew up in the region fielded questions about what life was like in the late nineteenth century in some of the towns we passed through, during an era when the Chinese were heartlessly and violently driven out of their homes and deprived of their livelihoods. The terms “collaboration” and “support” took on new meanings for many of us when we visited some of the Summit tunnels the Chinese had built. As we did our best to make our way down hills that were still covered with snow even though it was April, slipping and sliding and falling waist-deep into cold embankments, the helping hand of a colleague could make the difference between a safe landing and a twisted ankle. As we struggled with precarious footholds in dark tunnels paved with invisible stretches of black ice, the physical perils 20

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that the Chinese railroad workers themselves had endured as they built these tunnels were made tangible for us. They became painfully real when one of the youngest and most fit members of our group, our dedicated Project Manager, Gabe Wolfenstein, slipped and fractured his shoulder. (This was April—in an era of global warming! What had those tunnels been like in the colder months?!) The Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project now involves over 100 scholars from around the world. Many of us find that it has taken over our lives—and that is not a bad thing. The transnational collaboration has been enormously fruitful intellectually. And although fundraising has been a constant challenge, it helps to have collaborators who can draw not only on a broad range of educational institutions for support, but also governmental entities and foundations on two continents. The efforts of our colleagues in Guangdong have been supported by funding from Guangdong Province, which has given significant support to the Guangdong Overseas Chinese Publication Project in which our colleague Yuan Ding plays a central role. Colleagues based in Taipei and Kaohsiung have received support from the National Science Council of Taiwan/Ministry of Science and Technology as well as the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Exchange. US-based scholars have applied for and received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Exchange, among other sources, as well as our own universities and generous private donors. Coordinating the work of globally dispersed scholars writing in different languages, from different disciplinary perspectives, and from a broad range of academic cultures can be a challenge—even on the level of knowing what to call what we do. For example, archaeologists in China focus solely on prehistoric periods. They do not recognize what historical archaeologists in the US do as “archaeology.” We learned that the proper term in China for what historical archaeologists in the US do is “folk life studies.” The word “collaboration,” which has been celebrated early and often in this chapter, can itself pose problems. “To collaborate” takes on different connotations in Chinese than it does in English. “Cooperate” is the preferred term in Asia. “Collaboration” agreements became “cooperation” agreements. All of us have learned—and are still learning—important lessons about the subtle art of translation; and about “back translation”—the problem that occurs when Chinese scholars are re-translating back into English sources that were originally published in English but that they personally encountered only in Chinese translation. Many of these challenges are, as Huck Finn said in a different context, “interesting but tough.” But I think many of my colleagues would agree that for all its difficulties, the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project is one of the most exciting and stimulating scholarly ventures on which we’ve ever embarked—and one which continues to bear fruit. An edited volume, The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental, edited by Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, will be published by Stanford University Press in April 2019 (Chang and Fishkin 2019) (several essays in the volume were themselves collaborative ventures). In addition, a series of digital essays will be published by the Project on our website in 2019, and a curriculum guide for high school students will be launched, along with the Digital Materials Repository.

Coda Although my first transnational collaboration took place in 2006, it was far from my first experience with collaboration. Working with colleagues on a range of projects from 1990 through the early 2000s had taught me that when I selected the right people to work with, 21

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collaborating could be stimulating, satisfying, and great fun. Co-authoring an article on Frederick Douglass with Carla Peterson in 1990 helped me appreciate the ways in which two scholars could help each other generate ideas that each alone would not have come up with (Fishkin and Peterson 1990). I loved shepherding some 18 cutting-edge books to publication with Arnold Rampersad when we co-edited Oxford University Press’s book series in “Race and American Culture” from 1992 to 2002 (Rampersad and Fishkin 1992–2002). I greatly enjoyed collaborating with five American colleagues—Gloria Anzaldúa, Carla Peterson, Jeff Rubin-Dorsky, Lillian Robinson and Richard Yarborough—to develop and co-teach a class at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México on “Identity in America from a MultiCultural Perspective.”13 Co-editing Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism with Elaine in 1994 (Hedges and Fishkin 1994); People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on their Jewish Identity with Jeff Rubin-Dorsky in 1996 (Rubin-Dorsky and Fishkin 1996); and The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America with David Bradley in 1997 (Bradley and Fishkin 1997) forced me to immerse myself deeply in bodies of knowledge I had only dipped into previously, ascend steep new learning curves, and engage in a spirited give-and-take with ideas and strategies for conveying them with my co-editors. Those experiences transformed the kind of scholar that I was—for the better. Co-organizing a conference on the late works of Mark Twain in 2004 with Forrest Robinson (that took place at Stanford and UC-Santa Cruz and that led to a special issue of Arizona Quarterly) (Fishkin and Robinson) and a conference at Stanford for the Paul Laurence Dunbar Centennial in 2006 with Gavin Jones, Meta Jones, Arnold Rampersad, and Richard Yarborough (that led to a special issue of African American Review) (Fishkin et al. 2007) demonstrated for me the pleasures of sharing both the conceptualization and realization of a working conference and a special issue of a journal. And co-editing Sport of the Gods and Other Essential Writings by Paul Laurence Dunbar with David Bradley in 2005 (Fishkin and Bradley 2005) reminded me that having two people with different sensibilities and training collaborate to recover the work of a neglected writer whom both of them cherished could be wonderfully rewarding and serendipitous. I learned a lot by pursuing all of these ventures—and I found that friendships forged through sharing the challenges of developing an article, a book series, a class, a conference, an encyclopedia or an anthology, made the project at hand more attractive, more stimulating, and more enjoyable. But when it comes to doing work in Transnational American Studies, collaboration is not just desirable: it is essential. Other scholars are increasingly learning this, as well. For example, Emron Esplin and Margarida Vale de Gato’s co-edited volume, Translated Poe (Esplin and de Gato 2014), demonstrates the possible breadth that collaborative work in Transnational American Studies can accomplish in the digital age. Esplin was trained as an inter-Americanist in the United States, and Vale de Gato was trained as an Americanist in Portugal and has translated scores of US literary texts into Portuguese. Their mutual expertise in literary studies, combined with Vale de Gato’s experience as a translator and the distinct networks of academics that each editor brought to the project, allowed them to tap into various groups of literary critics, translators, and translation studies scholars across Europe, the Americas, Asia, and northern Africa to provide a book that offers 31 readings of Poe translations in 19 different national or regional literary traditions.14 Their collaboration produced a tremendously stimulating and ambitious volume that brought together commentaries on Poe by scholars based in Brazil, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Morocco, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, and the US; it also situated translations of Poe in multiple world literary traditions, engaged some of the thorny challenges of the translation process, and examined the cultural work that Poe’s 22

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poetry and fiction performs around the world. It is a model of the kind of work in Transnational American Studies that could emerge only from collaboration. In addition to making it possible to juxtapose a broad range of readings of and responses to American literature from locations around the globe, collaboration can also yield fresh insight into the genesis of a specific work by an American writer. For example, Ronald Jenn, a professor of translation studies at the Université de Lille in France, is currently collaborating with Linda Morris, a Twain scholar and professor emerita at the University of California, Davis, to explore the role played by French historical sources in Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1895–1896). They are conducting an exhaustive study of the marginalia Twain wrote in both French and English sources he consulted (volumes now housed in the Mark Twain Papers at UC-Berkeley) in an effort to “reframe Joan of Arc as the climax of Twain’s long time and paradoxical relationship with the French, and their language,” a relationship they view as “the result of a power struggle between France and the U.S.”15 Their research should also illuminate a conundrum that has long mystified Mark Twain scholars: why Twain considered Joan of Arc the best work of art he created. Jenn also collaborated on a book entitled Mark Twain & France: The Making of a New American Identity with Paula Harrington, a professor of American literature at Colby College (Harrington and Jenn 2017). When Twain wrote, “I am quite sure that (bar one) I have no race prejudices” (Twain 1992a, 355) it is widely accepted that the “one” referred to his prejudice against the French. Their book does more than shed light on Twain’s well-known lifelong animosity towards the French. As it examines in detail what transpired during Twain’s multiple periods of residence in France throughout this life (some eighteen months all told), it probes the complex ways in which France and the French served as a cultural foil in Twain’s efforts to construct “a new kind of ‘American’ identity in the second half of the nineteenth century” (Harrington and Jenn 2017, 6). In a welcome departure from the field’s often globally blinkered and hermetically sealed discussions of American exceptionalism, it compares French exceptionalism and American exceptionalism as it shines a light on Twain’s engagement with both (Harrington and Jenn 2017, 8). The Fulbright Program and the Commission franco-américaine, allowed Harrington to conduct initial research in Paris as a Fulbright Scholar in 2013 and to begin the conversations with Jenn that developed into the book. They continued their collaboration during stays as Fellows-in-Residence at Quarry Farm, the Clemens summer home in Elmira, New York, run by the Center for Mark Twain Studies. “Because our topic was transnational in essence, the confrontation of our points of view and methods helped us strike a balance between what could be of interest to scholars and general readers in both countries,” they write. “Intense discussions helped us define the general frame of our project and make sense of Mark Twain’s elusive and intriguing relationship to France… Harrington’s writing skills, her ability to contextualize scholarship, and background as a reporter gave zest and energy to what could have been a mere collection of scholarly details. Jenn’s background as a Translation Studies scholar was instrumental in assessing the historical and sociological mechanisms of Clemens’ literary reception in France and his relationship to the French as a nation on a worldwide scale.”16 As the projects described in this chapter make clear, collaboration is shaping the field of Transnational American Studies in profound ways. It is helping scholars frame questions that cannot be explored from one location alone, or from sources in one language alone. It is opening up fresh avenues of inquiry and generating unexpected insights. Younger scholars needing to establish reputations in the academy may worry that stealing time from writing monographs and single-authored articles to spend time on collaborative projects might be risky. At a moment when tenure committees may be ill equipped to evaluate a junior 23

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scholar’s role in a collaborative project, they may be right to be concerned. But mechanisms should be developed to make it possible to give junior scholars the credit they deserve for the time and effort they put into collaborative scholarship—to reward them for helping an ambitious, multi-faceted transnational project succeed. Embracing the energy and excitement of collaborative scholarly ventures will help Transnational American Studies ask the bold, complex and imaginative questions it needs to ask and frame the capacious answers those questions demand.

Notes 1 The journal’s first associate managing editors were Nigel Hatton and Steven Sunwoo Lee, then both graduate students in Stanford’s Program in Modern Thought and Literature, and Yanoula Athanassakis, a graduate student in English at UC-Santa Barbara. After the first several issues appeared, Tom Bender (New York University) joined the Editorial Board, becoming an editor emeritus in 2015. In 2015, Hsuan Hsu (UC-Davis) and Kevin Gaines (Cornell) joined the Editorial Board. Chris Suh, a Stanford graduate student in History joined the editorial team, first as Special Forums Editor, and later as CoManaging Editor. Brian Goodman (Arizona State University) succeeded Chris Suh as Special Forums Editor, a position he now shares with Erica Doss (Notre Dame University). Sabine Kim (Johannes Gutenberg University), who began as an Associate Managing Editor, is the current Managing Editor. Current Associate Managing Editors include Selina Lai-Henderson (Duke Kunshan University), Jonathan Leal (Stanford University), Brendan Shanahan (McGill University), and Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci (Stanford). Former editorial staff are Associate Managing Editors Corey Johnson (Stanford), who also served as Co-Managing Editor and Max Suechting (Stanford). For more, see http://escholarship.org/uc/search?entity=acgcc_jtas;view=aboutus, http://escholarship.org/uc/search?entity=acgcc_jtas;view=editorialboard, and http://escholarship.org/uc/search?entity=acgcc_jtas;view=advisoryboard. 2 David Bradley introduced How to Tell a Story and Other Stories and Essays; E.L. Doctorow, introduced The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Hal Holbrook introduced Speeches; Erica Jong introduced I601 and Is Shakespeare Dead?; Ursula Le Guin introduced The Diaries of Adam and Eve; Toni Morrison introduced Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Gore Vidal introduced Following the Equator and Anti-Imperialist Essays; and Kurt Vonnegut introduced A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Fishkin 1996). 3 “While most Americanists in the United States today reject celebratory narratives of American exceptionalism and nationalism, viewing earlier proponents of them as blinkered and benighted, many have a curious complacency about something that may strike future generations as equally benighted: an intellectual provincialism that is just as problematic. If the old exceptionalist, nationalist scholarship privileged the United States as a unique repository of progress and wisdom, many today privilege the work of U.S.–based scholars in an analogous way. As John Carlos Rowe has noted, ‘Even when we are dealing with international phenomena, such as imperialism, economic trade, and immigration and diaspora, we continue to rely on examples and authors from within the continental United States.’ If the citations in the books and articles we publish refer to nothing published outside the United States, if our syllabi include no article or book by a non–U.S.-based scholar, if the circle of colleagues with whom we regularly share our work all live in the United States, if we assume that the subject of our study is by definition what transpires within U.S. borders, and if all are comfortable reading or speaking no language but English, many of us see nothing amiss…. How can U.S.-based scholars have any perspective on their subject of study if they talk only to themselves? I do not want to privilege or essentialize location as a key determinant of the kind or quality of scholarship a person is likely to produce. What I do want to do, however, is interrogate the privileged position that US-based scholars and publications enjoy in the field of American studies” (Fishkin 2005a, 36). 4 My comments here draw on Fishkin, “American Literature in Transnational Perspective.” 5 Although JTAS friends and colleagues volunteered their advice and guidance on the book as a favor, I offered to pay individuals who did the translations, quickly exhausting my limited Stanford research funds paying stipends in the process. I began to lobby the Library of America for additional translator stipends. They had never been faced with such a request before. After all, they were the Library of America, and had assumed that everything they published would have been originally published in English (despite the fact that Werner Sollors and others had recently been uncovering America’s

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6

7

8

9 10

11

12 13

14 15 16

multilingual literary heritage). I persuaded them of the importance of coming up with a modest budget for translations (and I was pleasantly surprised when Geofrey O’Brien, the editor-in-chief of the Library of America, got involved himself in tweaking the translation of an essay by Borges). The project, entitled ROSETTA [ResOurceS for Endangered languages Through TranslAted texts] (https://francestanford.stanford.edu/projects/rosetta-resources-endangered-languages-through-translated-texts) builds on “Global Huck” a prospective “Deep Maps” project I described in JTAS in 2011 (Fishkin 2011b). It has received support from Maison Européenne des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société (MESHS) and from the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Members of the delegation from Guangdong universities and the provincial government included: Professor Zhang Guoxiong (张国雄): 五邑大学副校长 (Vice-Chancellor of Wu Yi University), Professor Zhang Yinglong (张应龙): 暨南大学华人华侨研究院副院长 (Associate Dean of Academy of Overseas Chinese Studies in Jinan University), Professor Yuan Ding (袁丁): 中山大学历史系教 授 (Professor of Department of History in Sun Yat-sen University), Professor Zhu Weibin (朱卫 斌) : 中山大学历史系教授 (Professor of Department of History in Sun Yat-sen University), Zhu Jiang (朱江): 广东省侨务办公室处长(Director of a Department in Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of Guangdong Province), and Cui Dong (崔东): 广东省侨务办公室干部 (Chief of a section in Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of Guangdong Province. (April 2013)). https://web.stanford.edu/group/chineserailroad/cgi-bin/website/2013/04/08/april-2013-delegation-visits-stanfordagreement-of-cooperation-signed/ Denise Khor, now of Boston University, was Research Coordinator when she was still at Stanford. Other present and past members of the Stanford team include Roland Hsu, who became Research Director after Denise left; Gabe Wolfenstein, our Project Manager; and researcher Teri Hessel, who uncovered valuable materials herself and also helped coordinate the student interns. Full programs for conferences the Project sponsored or co-sponsored in 2012, 2013, and 2014 are available on the Project’s website, archived under the “What’s New” tab http://web.stanford.edu/ group/chineserailroad/cgi-bin/wordpress/whats-new/page/2/. Honoring Stanford University with its Common Ground Award for the Advancement in U.S.-China Relations at its annual conference in San Francisco on April 25, 2014, the Committee of 100 recognized Stanford’s Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project as well as the university’s scientific and academic exchanges over the years. Stanford President John Hennessy received the award, and the Project’s co-directors, Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin were introduced to the audience. A short video describing the Project was shown. “The Chinese and the Iron Road.” Photographic exhibit curated by Gordon H. Chang, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and Sue Lee, co-sponsored by the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America and the Chinese Historical Society of America. Since its debut at Stanford on June 6, 2015, the exhibit has travelled to the Chinese Historical Society of America in San Francisco, the San Diego Public Library, and other venues. For links to press reports on the Project that have appeared in the US and in Asia, see http://web.sta nford.edu/group/chineserailroad/cgi-bin/wordpress/press/. “Identity in America from a Multi-Cultural Perspective.” Class co-taught by Gloria Anzaldúa, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Carla Peterson, Jeff Rubin-Dorsky, Lillian Robinson and Richard Yarborough under the auspices of Centro de Investigaciones Sobre Los Estados Unidos de America (CISUA) at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, June 1992. Emron Esplin, personal communication, August 26, 2016. France Berkeley Fund grant proposal, 2016, awarded to Linda Morris and Ronald Jenn. Paula Harrington and Ronald Jenn, personal communication, August 25, 2016.

Bibliography Bentzon, Thérèse. “Les Humoristes Américains: Mark Twain 1872.” Trans. Greg Robinson. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works. Ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Library of America, 2010, 24–29. Bradley, David, and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds. The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America. 3 vols. Armonk, NY: Sharpe Reference, 1998. Bruni, Livia. “L’Umorismo Americano: Mark Twain 1905.” Trans. Patricia Thompson Rizzo. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works. Ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Library of America, 2010, 108–112.

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Shelley Fisher Fishkin Castellanos, Jesús. “Mark Twain 1910.” Trans. Edward M. Test. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works. Ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Library of America, 2010, 133–136. Chang, Gordon H., and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds. (with Hilton Obenzinger and Roland Hsu). The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019. Chang, Gordon H., Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Sue Lee, curators, “The Chinese and the Iron Road.” Photographic exhibit co-sponsored by the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America and the Chinese Historical Society of America, 2015. Engel, Edouard. “Mark Twain.” Trans. Valerie Bopp. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works. Ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Library of America, 2010, 40–41. Engel, Edouard. “Mark Twain: Ein Amerikanischer ‘Humorist’ 1880.” Trans. Valerie Bopp. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works. Ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Library of America, 2010, 30–39. Erik, Maks (Zalman Merkin). ‫שלוס‬-‫“ טווען רקאמ און עליכס‬Sholem Aleichem and Mark Twain: Notes on the Eighth Anniversary of Sholem Aleichem’s Death.” Trans. Zachary M. Baker. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works. Ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Library of America, 2010, 151–157. Esplin, Emron, and Margarida Vale de Gato, eds. Translated Poe. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2014. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, ed. The Oxford Mark Twain (29 volumes). New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies— Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004.” American Quarterly 57. 1 (March 2005a): 17–57. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Wars of Words: American Writers and War.” The United States in Times of War and Peace. Ed. Zhou Baodi. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2005b. 1–26. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Asian Crossroads/Transnational American Studies.” The Japanese Journal of American Studies 17 (2006): 1–48. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, ed. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works. New York: Library of America, 2010. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “American Literature in Transnational Perspective: The Case of Mark Twain.” American Companion to American Literary Studies. Eds. Caroline F. Lavender and Robert S. Levine. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2011a. 279–293. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “‘Deep Maps’: A Brief for Digital Palimpsest Mapping Projects.” Journal of Transnational American Studies 3. 2 (2011b). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/92v100t0. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, and Carla L. Peterson. “‘We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident’: The Rhetoric of Frederick Douglass’s Journalism.” Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays. Ed. Eric Sundquist. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 166–188. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, and Ronald Jenn. “Project Description, ROSETTA [ResOurceS for Endangered languages Through TranslAted texts] Collaborative Grants Awarded, France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, 2017–2018.” https://francestanford.stanford.edu/projects/rosetta-resource s-endangered-languages-through-translated-texts. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, and David Bradley, eds. Sport of the Gods and Other Essential Writings by Paul Laurence Dunbar. New York: Random House/Modern Library, 2005. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, and Forrest G. Robinson, eds. “Mark Twain at the Turn-of the-Century: 1890– 1910.” Special Issue. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture and Theory 61.1 (2005). Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, Gavin Jones, Meta Jones, Arnold Rampersad, and Richard Yarborough, eds. “Paul Laurence Dunbar.” Special Issue, African American Review 41. 2 (Summer 2007). Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, and Takayuki Tatsumi, eds. “New Perspectives on ‘The War-Prayer’: An International Forum.” Mark Twain Studies 2 (October 2006): 26–28. Rpt. Journal of Transnational American Studies 1.1 (2009). https://escholarship.org/uc/acgcc_jtas/1/1. Gauthier-Villars, Henry. “Mark Twain. 1884.” Trans. Greg Robinson. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works. Ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Library of America, 2010, 56–60. Guerra, Ángel. “Prólogo: Mark Twain Cuentos Escogidos 1912.” Trans. Edward M. Test. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works. Ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Library of America, 2010, 105–107. Harrington, Paula, and Ronald Jenn. Mark Twain & France: The Making of a New American Identity. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri, 2017.

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Collaboration in TAS Hedges, Elaine, and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds. Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Jenn, Ronald, and Linda A. Morris. “The Sources of Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.” Mark Twain Journal 55. 1 (2017): 55–74. Lu, Xun (Zhou Shuren). 夏娃日记》小引 [“A Short Introduction to ‘Eve’s Diary’ 1931.”] Trans. Li Gongzhao. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works. Ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Library of America, 2010, 173–175. Martí, José. “Escenas Norteamericanas. La Nación, 1885.” Trans Edward M. Test. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works. Ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Library of America, 2010a, 48–53. Martí, José. “Escenas Norteamericanas. La Nación, 1890.” Trans. Rubén Builes and Cintia Santana. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works. Ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Library of America, 2010b, 53–55. Rampersad, Arnold and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds. Race and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992–2002. Rubin-Dorsky, Jeffrey, and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds. People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. Startsev, Abel. “Mark Twain and America. 1963.” Trans. Nina Yermakov Morgan and Katya Valdimirov. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works. Ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Library of America, 2010, 293–295. Tsvetaeva, Marina. Книги в краснëм переплётe [“Books Bound in Red. 1910.”] Trans. Yuri Tretyakov. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works. Ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Library of America, 2010, 115–116. Twain, Mark. “Concerning the Jews. 1899.” Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, 1891–1910. Ed. Louis J. Budd. New York: Library of America, 1992a, 354–370. Twain, Mark. “The War Prayer [sic] 1905.” Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, 1891– 1910. Ed. Louis J. Budd. New York: Library of America, 1992b, 652–655. Twain, Mark. “The Jumping Frog: In English. Then in French. Then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More By Patient, Unremunerated Toil.” The Oxford Mark Twain (29 vols.). Ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, 28–43. Twain, Mark. “New Perspectives on ‘The War-Prayer’: An International Forum.” Eds. Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Takayuki Tatsumi. Mark Twain Studies 2 (October 2006): 26–28. Voss, Barbara, ed. “The Historical Experience of Labor: Archeological Contributions to Interdisciplinary Research on Chinese Railroad Workers.” Special Issue. Historical Archeology 49. 1 (2015): 4–23. Wakefield, Tanu. “Photo Exhibition on Central Pacific Railroad’s History Comes to Stanford.” Stanford News, November 19, 2015. https://news.stanford.edu/thedish/2015/11/09/photo-exhibition-on-cen tral-pacific-railroads-history-comes-to-stanford/.

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PART I

Theorizing Transnational American Studies

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2 REORIENTING THE TRANSNATIONAL Transatlantic, transpacific, and antipodean Paul Giles

Introduction Transnationalism as a critical method gained visibility in the 1990s, as a reaction against the tendency of traditional literary histories to offer idealized, essentialist versions of racial or national domains. Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993), one of the earliest and most influential works in this field, deliberately took issue with the propensity of the Black Arts movement in the United States to read radical traditions exclusively in relation to African American politics and argued instead that transatlantic cultural influences had helped crucially to shape black cultural identity, with Gilroy discussing the significance of W. E. B. Du Bois’s time in Germany and the latter part of Richard Wright’s writing career amidst the existentialists in Paris.1 All of this had the effect of dislocating the imaginary identification of American subjects with their native context, an equation that had for many years propped up the American Studies movement in the United States, whose guiding theoretical premise was based upon the supposedly exceptionalist qualities of the U.S. environment. There was consequently significant tension around the turn of the twenty-first century between American Studies departments or programs whose intellectual rationale was based upon the country’s self-defining mythologies—the open frontier, Tocquevillean notions of democracy, the Civil War, and so on—and a theoretical momentum that was seeking to place such formulations within a broader, more interrogatory framework. Transnational American Studies thus sought to introduce a quizzical, reflexive dimension into the definition of this area studies field, rather than simply taking the assumptions of national conditions for granted. The deployment of the Atlantic as a symbolic presence within Americanist cultural history is of course an old phenomenon, one that can be traced back through traditional studies of how the Puritan Fathers crossed the Atlantic in the seventeenth century, along with celebrated works by Bernard Bailyn, J. G. A. Pocock, and other scholars on ways in which the ideas of John Locke and other progressive thinkers helped to shape the cultural and political formations of the New World during the Revolutionary era.2 One new approach practiced by transnationalism as a critical method in the latter part of the twentieth century, however, involved its tendency to represent national states as being in a constant process of flux and renegotiation. Whereas national history that emerged from Victorian times was inflected by Ernst Renan’s conception that the nation represented what Renan in 1882 called a “spiritual 31

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principle,” transnationalism in the 1990s was more strongly influenced by embryonic studies in the sociology of globalization (Renan 1996, 52). Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large (1996), a work that became widely cited in literary and cultural studies, described ways in which societies in the last decades of the twentieth century were rendered fluid by the constant flow of people, finance, and commodities across national borders. Appadurai’s five categories—ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes—were driven in large part by changes in technology, particularly the widespread dissemination of the Internet in the early 1990s, all of which allowed capital and information to be circulated globally on a more routine basis (Arjun 1996, 33). Indeed, the theoretical dimensions of transnationalism, as that idea became more prominent at the turn of the twenty-first century, were interwoven in manifold ways with the rapid dynamics of technological change within information technology. This did not mean, however, that the academic focus of transnationalism was only on the contemporary world. All history is necessarily written in reverse, with scholars seeking to reconceptualize the past in the light of preoccupations of their own time, and this new emphasis on mobility across national borders served to re-illuminate aspects of transnational history that had been occluded within more conventional national narratives. There was more attention within the rubric of transnationalism, for example, to Frederick Douglass’s speaking tours of Great Britain, where his radical views were significantly shaped by exposure to Chartist ideas in the late 1840s, and to ways in which Henry Adams’s aesthetic philosophies were impacted by his travels through Japan in 1886 (Giles 2002, 24; Benfey 2003, 109– 176). There was also more emphasis on how material infrastructures that did not accord naturally with national formations exerted a significant influence on the cultural politics of different eras, with for example the lack of an International Copyright Act until 1891 meaning that various American authors, from E. D. E. N. Southworth to Mark Twain, strategically sought residence in London in order to safeguard their English royalties, sources of income that would have been at risk had the author not been living in that country.3 One distinguishing feature of transnationalism is its propensity to make associations between cultural narratives and the material infrastructures underpinning them, and from this perspective the ways in which literary texts circulated between different domains can be understood as a crucial component informing their worldly constitution. Rather than just understanding literary narratives in formal terms, transnationalism also illuminated the production and reception of cultural goods across a broader international axis. Though Gilroy’s work and concurrent studies of slavery meant that the Atlantic comprised the initial focus of transnationalism, this critical movement eventually extended also across other domains. Indeed, one of its most signal characteristics was how the shape of its cultural input varied depending on which particular geographical area was entering into its formulation in any given scholarly project. There was, for example, some valuable work done in hemispheric studies, with Anna Brickhouse, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, and others discussing ways in which the literature of the United States overlapped and intersected with the cultures of Central and South America. One important aspect here was the language differential, with transnationalism often implying a bilingual capacity, whereby writers would negotiate two or more linguistic fields simultaneously, although various uses of global English or local dialect also tended to render the question of any kind of linguistic purity moot, or at any rate problematic. In the years after World War II, area studies specialists would demand language expertise as a sine qua non for the entry of specialists into any particular field—no student of Japanese culture in Europe or the United States would be taken seriously unless he or she was thoroughly immersed in the host language—but within the transnational force field, 32

Reorienting the transnational

where forms of overlap and hybridity between different cultures became much more commonplace, many important academic studies considered ways in which U.S. cultural narratives were creatively misrecognized or appropriated in Asia, and vice versa. William Gibson’s cyberpunk fiction, and the ways in which popular culture from Japan and the United States exerted a mutual influence upon each other, was just one example of this phenomenon (Tatsumi 2006). Hence the key question for transnationalism was not so much cultural identity or autonomy, but how different cultures intersected with one another in complex and sometimes perplexing ways. Mary Louise Pratt’s 1991 essay “Arts of the Contact Zone,” which was reworked for her book Imperial Eyes the following year, was another seminal influence on the theoretical and practical construction of early transnationalism (Pratt 1991, 33–40). Pratt’s focus on specific geographical locations such as Cuba and Florida or San Diego and Tijuana, where different languages and cultures enter into proximity and dialogue, exemplified the renewed interest at this time in multiculturalism that was also manifesting itself in the infamous “canon wars” at Stanford and elsewhere, where academic faculty in English departments argued about whether dead white males should continue to hold sway over the curricular inclusion of women and “minority” writers. Within this fractious context, a new style of immigration novel began to emerge, one characteristically involving not a simple transition from old country to new, but a situation in which protagonists lived at least by proxy in two domains simultaneously. Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990) is set in the Philippines of the 1950s, but it evokes the hybrid nature of this island society, where influences from American popular culture have become all pervasive. As Hagedorn’s heroine Rio grows up to live in the United States, in the midst of all the American popular culture she experienced as a child in a more virtualized fashion, she mediates this overseas past through the voice of a narrator who looks back at her native heritage from a position safely ensconced within the American heartland. Hagedorn’s model was also replicated in other novels of this time such as Julia Alvarez’s novel How the García Girls Lost their Accents (1991), which concerns a family of sisters emigrating from the Dominican Republic to the Bronx, and it suggests how transnationalism during the early 1990s had a tendency to become domesticated for American purposes. We see this again in subsequent novels by such now institutionally celebrated figures as Gish Jen or Jhumpa Lahiri, where the transposition of an overseas homeland (in their cases China or India) into the host domain becomes a guarantee of traditional American values. Sociologists, however, have often given this transnational impetus a more hard-edged emphasis, with Peggy Levitt, in The Transnational Villagers (2001), offering a case study of how migrants from Miraflores, a town in the Dominican Republic, to Jamaica Plain, a neighbourhood of Boston, participate through cheap flights, phone calls, and Internet connections in the social, political, and economic lives of their homeland and their host society at the same time (Levitt 2001, 23–53). Thus the transnational village, in Levitt’s sense, functions not through spatial proximity but through a material infrastructure of cheap communications technology. There are many uncomfortable political implications of such a development, since to conceive of a nation-state that stretches beyond its traditional geographical boundaries is also to imagine, by a concomitant reverse projection, an American state whose territory is no longer automatically synonymous with the interests of U.S. citizens. Although American celebrations of transnational diversity tended to marginalize such concerns, there were elements of such unsettling alterity in some versions of literary and cultural theory, with Edouard Glissant’s “poetics of relation,” for example, involving an extrapolation of the Caribbean island geography of the Antilles into a “post-territorial agenda,” whose fluidity would imply a broader dissolution of the nation state’s fixed contours (Hallward 1998, 456). In this sense, Glissant 33

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was attempting to use a specific geographic location to address the state of transnational circulation more generally, and this differentiates his work from what one might call the softer versions of transnationalism, which were generally concerned more to accommodate multiple nationalities within the traditional domestic melting pot of e pluribus unum. The reorientation towards more transpacific forms of transnationalism in the first decade of the twenty-first century was driven in part by geopolitical shifts in power. The National Intelligence Council’s 2020 Project, convened under the chairmanship of Princeton professor of International Relations John Ikenberry which reported to President George W. Bush in 2005, suggested that the sheer size of the population of China and India—forecast by 2020 to be 1.4 billion and 1.3 billion respectively—would ensure their standards of living need not approach Western levels for these countries to become significant economic forces. This would result, suggested the Ikenberry report, in globalization by 2020 becoming linked in the popular mind with a rising Asia, replacing its automatic association at the turn of the twenty-first century with the idea of Americanization.4 Such awareness of global realignments induced U.S. politicians to place greater emphasis on the Pacific region as a crucial zone for strategic defence and, according to their more optimistic estimates, greater market penetration in relation to commercial trade. Hillary Clinton, visiting Australia as Secretary of State in 2012, called the twenty-first century “the Pacific century,” and President Obama himself told the Australian federal parliament in 2011: “The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay” (quoted in Martin 2012, 1; Hartcher 2012, 9). Again, there is nothing inherently new about this transpacific aspect to U.S. history. In 2009, indeed, American historian Bruce Cumings argued for greater recognition of “a Pacific dimension that began with the frontier and mid-nineteenth-century relations with East Asia,” with Cumings tracing an alternative genealogy for U.S. history that focussed on the Pacific rather than the Atlantic as the site of the nation’s formative engagements (Cumings 2009, ix). What distinguishes this revisionist approach, however, is its implicit dialectic between contemporary politics and the legacy of the past, something that impels Cumings and other transpacific scholars to reconceptualize the U.S. domain as a series of historical encounters between near and far, rather than regarding the subject as bound inextricably to one specific site of geographical integrity. The twenty-first-century understanding of transpacific relations thus effectively changes the shape of U.S. cultural history, and in 2011 Steven G. Yao suggested how the “Black Atlantic” paradigm that had been ubiquitous over the past twenty years, with its emphasis on the transportation of slaves from Africa through Europe to America, had afforded the Atlantic “a disproportionately prominent and central place” in “efforts to map the terrains of global modernity” on behalf of American Studies (Yao 2011, 132). This new transpacific focus has also brought increased attention to the work of Chinese American authors such as Maxine Hong Kingston and other Asian Americans based primarily on the U.S. West Coast. Expanding this geographical realm still further, the rise of environmental criticism in the first two decades of the twenty-first century has also brought more attention to ways in which the United States and other Western societies relate to the polar regions of the Arctic and Antarctic. Thus area studies in the more traditional sense, which focussed on identifying characteristics of particular domains within clearly defined borders, has gradually been superseded by a more planetary consciousness, which concerns itself more with how any given culture relates to a larger global sphere. Transnational methodology also involves an awareness of reciprocities, of ways in which different cultural formations mutually impact upon each other through variegated cycles of exchange. In this sense, it carries a different ideological slant from postcolonialism, where the emphasis falls more on where cultures are aligned on a dominant or subordinate political axis. 34

Reorienting the transnational

The circuitous imaginative dimensions of transnational exchange, in other words, often elude the more straightforward mechanisms of political coercion. In his 2010 book Asia as Method, Kuan-Hsing Chen described ways in which processes of Americanization had become embedded within everyday social formations in Taiwan, with America having “been so thoroughly integrated into our thoughts and practices that we have lost the ability to critically engage with the issue of U.S. imperialism at all” (Chen 2010, 178). Thus, Chen concluded, “[b]eing anti-American is like opposing ourselves” (Chen 2010, 186). Chen defined “deimperialization” as “theoretically a much wider movement than decolonization,” since it speaks to how political codes get translated into psychological terms, thereby addressing not just how colonization functions bureaucratically but also how it becomes displaced into realms of affect, where an attachment to the coercive object can take on the form of a double bind (Chen 2010, 6). It is one of the characteristics of a transnational agenda to focus not just on hegemonic political structures but on the symbolic and aesthetic forms that sustain them, and this allows scope for the prevalence of structural overdetermination and ambiguity, since such worldly phenomena tend to be shaped always by multiple and often circuitous causes. There has also been some important work on ways in which these transnational pressures have worked their way back into the heart of the U.S. community, with the insecurities that Chen noted among the population of Taiwan also being shared by denizens of Middle America. Institutions of higher education based in the United States have often set out global awareness programs that regard the rest of the world as an annex of their own privileged domain; indeed, laughably enough, the University of California at Berkeley chose in 2014 to establish its “global campus” at Richmond Bay, a mere sixteen miles from San Francisco, with the university’s Chancellor calling it “a transformational model for expansion of our educational and research activities in a global context.”5 The transnational model, however, probes ways in which national identity has always been a fractured and fractious phenomenon, and this is why it accords readily with the slippages associated with psychoanalysis that critics such as Chen and Homi K. Bhabha have linked to the political domain. Bhabha’s model of national identity as linked to “split subjects” works well with the double impulse of transnationalism, where concepts owe allegiance to at least two centers of gravity simultaneously (Bhabha 1994, 28). The social and economic realities in a multicentered world are, then, much more complicated than the unipolar American model of globalization would allow. Fredric Jameson, writing specifically in 1986 about the intractable relation between the United States and “third-world literature,” suggested how the “view from the top is epistemologically crippling” (Jameson 1986, 85) and he emphasized the need for a “ceaseless effort to remind the American public of the radical difference of other national situations” (Jameson 1986, 77). However, imminent threats to contemporary American prosperity through outsourcing and the widespread transfer of production capacities overseas, as well as the traumatic event of 9/ 11 whose effects all depended on the capacity of aliens to penetrate U.S. borders, have made the American public much more aware than they used to be of the fragile boundaries between their own heartland and the wider world (Baudrillard 2002, 403–415). French political theorist Etienne Balibar observed in 2001 how borders are no longer “entirely situated at the outer limit of territories” but are—through international media, finance, and so on—dispersed everywhere within them: “border areas … are not marginal to the constitution of a public sphere but rather are at the center” (Balibar 2004, 1–2). This has also been the conundrum for the United States in a transnational era: the very forms of technological modernity that link the country to a wider world have also become the sources of its vulnerability, as the rest of the world interfaces with the United States to such an extent that it 35

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becomes more difficult to demarcate discrete territorial zones. Transnationalism studies these sites of potential friction without necessarily seeking to impose a priori assumptions upon them, with its key methodological premise being not any given political position per se, but rather ways in which flows of cultural and economic exchange converge or conflict with the established directions and parameters of national interests. Hence there is always something paradoxical about transnational formations, since they work through inverting and transposing the national forms which they themselves epistemologically depend upon. In this sense, the relational aspects necessarily inherent within an antipodean perspective can be seen as appropriate to this sense of transnationalism as a conjunction of opposing forces. Australian art historian Bernard Smith wrote in his “Antipodean Manifesto” of 1959 of how “[i]t is natural … that we should see and experience nature differently in some degree from the artists of the northern hemisphere” (Smith 1976, vii) and, as Peter Beilharz has observed, Smith’s understanding of the antipodes “as a relation, not a place,” can be understood as commensurate with the dynamics of transnationalism more generally (Beilharz 1997, xiii). Smith himself used the word “trans-national” (in its hyphenated form) as early as 1986, in his foreword to Peter Fuller’s The Australian Scapegoat, where he praised Fuller for being “the first person to grasp the trans-national implications of the Antipodean intervention of 1959” (Beilharz 1997, xiii); and there is a clear intellectual genealogy between Smith’s fascination with what Beilharz has called “peripheral vision, and dual vision” (Beilharz 1997, 99) and the ways in which transnationalism as a critical method subsequently became codified. Many of Smith’s most famous works take delight in juxtaposing apparently disparate categories and in complicating established hierarchies by suggesting ways in which dominant and subordinate impulses become mutually defining, as in his book European Vision and the South Pacific (Smith 1960), which chronicles ways in which Eurocentric traditions of natural order around the time of the Enlightenment were disturbed by the appearance of the South Pacific as a new region within global consciousness. In his recent work on “archipelagic diaspora,” American scholar Brian Russell Roberts projects the idea of an antipodean imaginary in a similar kind of theoretical way, describing for instance “the East Indies, and West Indies, Haiti and Tahiti, Caledonia and New Caledonia” as “antipodal island-spaces” (Roberts 2013, 144), while inferring from this term how “antipodal [is] … a site of unpresentable distance from the human world, and … a site of emancipatory inversion in relation to that world” (Roberts 2013, 128). Antipodean transnationalism epistemologically complicates boundaries of time as well as space, since its different formulations of temporal scale disrupt the normative period categories established by Western cultural history. David Armitage has written of Australia as exemplary for the new kind of “transtemporal” history (Armitage 2012, 497), as he put it, since the country’s two distinct temporal horizons—white settlement since 1789, but an Indigenous history going back 40,000 years—serves effectively to foreground the “boundary breaking” experimentation with different scales of time and space that is now coming to characterize mainstream history more generally (Armitage 2013). In their introduction to the 2013 Cambridge History of Australia, Alison Bashford and Stuart McIntyre wrote of how “Australia’s history has unfolded on vastly different scales, temporal and geographical” (Bashford and McIntrye 2013, 1), while Mark McKenna later in the same volume discussed the “profound dislocation” wrought to Australian history, and to its “body politic” more generally, by the recuperation of material legacies from archaeology and Indigenous cultures toward the end of the twentieth century (McKenna 2013, 577). This is commensurate with ways in which recent environmental criticism, often associated with the cultural politics of climate change, has also sought to juxtapose human cultures against more extensive temporal 36

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trajectories. Dipesh Chakrabarty, who described how climate change became for him an “emotional issue” when he was working in Australia, related the “Climate of History” in 2009 to the “Anthropocene,” taking this term from Nobel-winning chemist Paul J. Crutzen’s original deployment of the word in 2000 to designate “the beginning of a new geological era, one in which humans act as a main determinant of the environment of the planet” (Chakrabarty 2009,209). Chakrabarty subsequently drew on the question of climate change to address how discursive narratives of economics and geology are converging, and hence “the challenge of having to think of human agency over multiple and incommensurable scales at once” (Chakrabarty 2012, 1). In this way, as Djelal Kadir observed, Chakrabarty conceptually reconfigured a traditional comparative methodology to work toward distinguishing “human agency” by comparing it to that of other kinds of species and “geophysical force” across the planet, thereby seeking to decenter human history by juxtaposing it with more expansive global formations, and this strategy might be said to take the transnational turn one stage further (Kadir 2013, 651). In a report on the Comparative Literature field in 2014, Ursula K. Heise specifically linked the emerging strand of “multispecies ethnography” in ecocriticism to the work of anthropologists and literary critics such as Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren working from an antipodean perspective (Heise 2019. The key thing here is to recognize how the antipodean becomes not just a geographical but a formal marker, a way of introducing alterity into conventional Western designs by correlating interfaces across spatial or temporal dimensions that have not heretofore been intellectually aligned. Just as Glissant’s “poetics of relation” involve an extrapolation of the Caribbean island geography of the Antilles into a more generalized condition of deterritorialization, so the tropes of the antipodean transnational and transtemporal might be said to restructure the history of world culture more generally across radically different scales, one where inverse perspectives become naturalized and normalized. This again highlights ways in which transnationalism works more as a methodology than as a discrete subject formation, a way of scrutinizing regular markers of time and space rather than presenting itself merely as a reflection of contemporary social realities. In her 1993 book, published in England as Nations Without Nationalism, Julia Kristeva argued that the function of transnationalism involves stimulating and updating “discussion on the meaning of the ‘national’ today” (Kristeva 1993, 50). Transnationalism characteristically positions itself at a point of intersection—Kristeva talked about “a transnational or international position situated at the crossing of boundaries”—where the ideological infrastructures informing national communities are re-examined from an estranged position, so that their embedded, naturalized assumptions become visible (Kristeva 1993, 15). Spatial vectors typically operate with regularized conceptions of center and periphery, a right way up and a wrong way round, which it might be seen as the antipodean burden figuratively to unravel, and this is where the antipodean can be seen as a theoretical extension of the transnational, in the way it problematizes the construction of stable geographical parameters and epistemological hierarchies. In What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (2016), Pheng Cheah described incisively how the “normative theory of world literature” (Cheah 2016, 6) is based on an understanding of the world’s spatial and temporal categories as determined by the Northern Hemisphere, which become a structural guarantor of “power and domination” (Cheah 2016, 32), and he looked to “literature of the postcolonial South” (Cheah 2016, 194) as a means of alleviating this critical imbalance. However, such a displacement would merely recapitulate the familiar postcolonial dynamic of hegemony and resistance from an oppositional perspective, seeking to valorize the subordinate factor in this 37

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equation rather than to interrogate the premises of its construction. Whereas Cheah sought to problematize the hegemonic scope and normative temporality of the World Literature project by invoking alternative geographical spaces, a transnational approach would suggest in a more reflexive manner how such global narratives intersect in uncomfortable ways with discrete national spaces, so that imperial centers themselves become susceptible to systemic insecurities rather than simply imposing their political will on others. While there is a clear overlap between the postcolonial and the transnational, there is an equally clear difference of emphasis in their critical trajectories. On one level, such a theoretical move recapitulates what Paul Gilroy has described as the intervention of “planetarity and cosmopolitics” as a way “of chipping the crust of incorrigibility from the universalist rendering of European particulars,” the mode that would seek blindly to appropriate European vision as a synecdoche for universal knowledge (Gilroy 2010, 622). But, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak noted in taking issue with Gilroy’s terms, “planetarity” in itself is “not a very useful idea,” since “[y]ou cannot be a planetarist geographer” (Spivak 2014, 72). Just as Adelaide-based J. M. Coetzee stated in a 2001 interview that he “would prefer to think more globally, but one can’t write a sort of globally set novel. It has to be somewhere” (Coetzee 2001, n. pag.), so Spivak disavowed an abstract conception of planetarity that would seek implicitly to rise above the perspective of any given “animate collectivity living on a planet” (Spivak 2014, 5). This is the principle of “situatedness,” as Donna J. Haraway describes it, where “location is itself always a complex construction as well as inheritance,” based on the assumption that a human body must incarnate itself somewhere, and must thus necessarily be bound to the partial perspectives associated with one particular place (Haraway 1997, 270). Transnationalism in this sense speaks to the inextricably material conditions of both human life and social life, the ways in which abstract conceptions of globalization, the circulation of media and finance across international spheres, must always encounter an experiential reality that does not necessarily accord with such disembodied designs. This is another reason for understanding the theoretical impetus of transnationalism as involving a paradoxical intervention. Operating in a global environment that tends to privilege a version of the simulacrum tied to various forms of decathexis, transnationalism also pays attention to the more material, recognizable aspects of human life—bodily existence, communal interaction, the genealogical layers of local identification and national affiliation—while examining how these engage uneasily in various forms of transaction with the conditions of global modernity.

Notes 1 Gilroy’s book focuses on Du Bois in Chapter Four and Wright in Chapter Five (see Gilroy 1993). 2 See, for example, Bailyn1967 and Pocock 1975. 3 For a fine analysis of how these kinds of material constraints operated in the mid-19th century, see McGill 2003. 4 National Intelligence Council 2004, 10–11. 5 “Berkeley Global Campus: A New, Bolder Vision for Richmond Bay.” Berkeley News. October 30, 2014. news.berkeley.edu/2014/10/30/berkeley-global-campus. 9 May 2016. This project was suspended in 2016 due to budget cuts.

Bibliography Alvarez, Julia. How the García Girls Lost their Accents. London: Bloomsbury, 2004[1991]. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

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Reorienting the transnational Armitage, David. “What’s the Big Idea? Intellectual History and the Longue Durée.” History of European Ideas 38. 4 (Dec. 2012): 493–507. Armitage, David. “Horizons of History: Space, Time and the Future of the Past.” Lecture given at the University of New South Wales, August 15, 2013. Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. Balibar, Etienne. We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Bashford, Alison, and Stuart McIntyre. “Introduction.” The Cambridge History of Australia, Volume 1: Indigenous and Colonial Australia. Eds. A. Bashford and S. McIntyre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Baudrillard, Jean. “L’Esprit du Terrorisme.” Trans. Michel Valentin. South Atlantic Quarterly 101. 2 (2002): 403–415. Beilharz, Peter. Imagining the Antipodes: Culture, Theory and the Visual in the Work of Bernard Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Benfey, Christopher. The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan. New York: Random House, 2003. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Brickhouse, Anna. Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Climate and Capital.” Lecture given at the University of Sydney. July 23, 2015. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change.” New Literary History 43. 1 (Winter 2012): 1–18. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35. 2 (Winter 2009): 197–222. Cheah, Pheng. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Chen, Kuan-Hsing. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Coetzee, J. M. “Interview with Peter Sachs.” Lannan Foundation. podcast.lannan.org. Nov. 8, 2001. Cumings, Bruce. Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Giles, Paul. Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Gilroy, Paul. “Planetarity and Cosmopolitics.” British Journal of Sociology 61. 3 (Sept. 2010): 620–626. Glissant, Eduard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997[1990]. Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Hagedorn, Jessica. Dogeaters. New York: Penguin, 1991[1990]. Hallward, Peter. “Edouard Glissant between the Singular and the Specific.” Yale Journal of Criticism 11.2 (1998): 441–464. Haraway, Donna J. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997. Hartcher, Peter. “Toothless among Asian Tigers.” Sydney Morning Herald, July 21–22, 2012. Heise, Ursula K. “Comparative Literature and the Environmental Humanities. State of the Discipline Report: The 2014–2015 Report on the State of the Discipline of Comparative Literature.” stateofthe discipline.acla.org/entry/comparative-literature-and-environmental- humanities. January 8, 2019. Jameson, Fredric. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15 (Autumn 1986): 65–88. Kadir, Djelal. “What Does the Comparative Do for Literary History?” PMLA 128. 3 (May 2013): 644–651. Kristeva, Julia. Nations Without Nationalism. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993[1990]. Levitt, Peggy. The Transnational Villagers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. National Intelligence Council. Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council’s 2020 Project. Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 2004.

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Paul Giles Martin, Sarah. “Hillary Clinton Warns Australia against ‘false choice’ between US and China.” The Australian. Nov. 15, 2012. McGill, Meredith L. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. McKenna, Mark. “The History Anxiety.” The Cambridge History of Australia, Volume 2: The Commonwealth of Australia. Ed. Bashford and McIntyre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pocock, J.G.A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession (1991): 33–40. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Renan, Ernst. “What Is a Nation?” Becoming National: A Reader. trans. Martin Thom. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Roberts, Brian Russell. “Archipelagic Diaspora, Geographical Form, and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” American Literature 85. 1 (March 2013): 121–149. Smith, Bernard. “The Antipodean Manifesto.” The Antipodean Manifesto: Essays in Art and History. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1976. Smith, Bernard. European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960. Smith, Bernard. Foreword to The Australian Scapegoat: Towards an Antipodean Aesthetic. Peter Fuller. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1986. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Scattered Speculations on Geography: The 2012 Antipode AAG Lecture.” Antipode 46. 1 (2014): 1–12. Tatsumi, Takayuki. Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Yao, Steven G. “The Rising Tide of the Transpacific.” Literature Compass 8. 3 (2011): 130–141.

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3 WORLDING AMERICA AND TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES Oliver Scheiding

Introduction This chapter understands the concept of worlding as a multi-layered practice of analysis for a transnational text-network model that is based on iteration rather than origination.1 It examines the flows of texts across different languages, cultures, and nations. Literary globalization is not a phenomenon of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Processes of textual travel, mediation, and translation characterize the transatlantic world of colonial South and North America, which have created hybrid interplays and co-agencies between local cultures and multilingual, metropolitan literatures, or what has been called the “literary commons” of the Atlantic world (Bannet 2011, 9). The aim of this chapter is to understand networks of texts, persons, and things in the wider context of the early Americas and their literatures’ multiple transnational ties. It seeks to describe “the nature of these ties (social imaginaries, affective bonds, visions of arts, redescriptions of reality)” and “the techniques of invention, borrowing, dissemination” (Felski 2016, 761) that go along with them. Recent transnational scholarship, comparative literature studies, and the history of the book (cf. Hebel 2012; Shu-mei Shih 2013; Fleming 2016) have demonstrated, however, that the alleged metropolitan textual hegemonies and national trajectories are frequently out of sync with the actual local literatures in the past. As to its critical practice, the chapter emphasizes therefore cross-temporal connections whenever mixed constellations of texts, persons, and things occur. In what follows, this chapter reassesses Transnational American Studies by introducing the concept of worlding as a relational mode of thinking and—in the second part—by rebooting a defunct and moribund assemblage of texts from around the colonial world of the Americas.

Transnational American Studies as relational studies In their recent collection of essays on American literary studies, Caroline Levander and Robert Levine state that Americanists have moved away from the traditional categorization of genre, period, and author, which has also led to a shift in the object and method of their inquiry. Instead of “a canon to be curated or an archive to be preserved,” they study “a hybrid textual corpus, deploying a wide array of interpretative strategies and methods … to 41

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reconceive what we thought we knew about the study of American literature” (Levander and Levine 2011, 1). Donald Pease summarizes this shift as a move from a national to a global frame for analysis that corresponds to the relationship of the United States to the world in other sectors. While Americanists have traditionally worked with a “limited number of objects that were produced at the intersection of periodization and generic concepts” (Pease 2007, 9), they must now account for the various influences connected with the global movements of capital, people, and culture. Pease and Paul Giles, among other scholars, regard the “theoretical assumptions and methodological procedures that underpinned the Americanist’s production of literary knowledge” as directly connected to the national culture, history, and an “ideological consensus that rendered the United States exceptional” (Pease 2007, 9; Giles 2011, 1–28). American exceptionalism denotes a belief in the uniqueness of the country as the first independent nation, and that its cultural production is closely related to its rise and mission of “Anglo-Globalism” (Arac 2002, 35). This belief was even inherent in the first exploration of the transnational dimension of American culture, as demonstrated by Winfried Fluck in his 2007 article “Theories of American Culture (and the Transnational Turn in American Studies).” Randolph Bourne’s 1916 essay titled “Trans-national America” regards America as spearheading the movement of modernity as a “cosmopolitan enterprise” that includes and adapts European cultural influences. Bourne asserts that “America is coming to be, not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors” (Bourne 1916, 96). While Bourne does not attempt to establish a specific and separate American culture, his argument substantiates exceptionalism in placing “America” (i.e., the United States) at the center of the convergence of cultural influences, thus making it unique (Fluck 2007). To avoid endorsing a national fallacy, Giles and Pease reconceptualize “America” from both a transnational and a localized perspective to make visible the global conditions of cultural production. They relate their analysis of literature and culture in the Americas to the effects of globalization on politics and economy. In its most general sense, transnational means that something extends “beyond national bounds or frontiers,” or involves multiple nations (OED). In order to analyse literature under such a premise, Giles adopts a terminology developed by the French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their psychoanalytical study of capitalism, Anti-Oedipus (1972). According to Deleuze and Guattari, the flows of capitalism are “increasingly deterritorialized” (Giles 2011, 12–13). Using this spatial metaphor to diagnose the geographic extent of cultural flows, Giles couples the deterritorialization of American literature with its reterritorialization, a specific locality in which these flows and influences become visible. Giles links, for instance, South America with the southern United States and shows the global dimension in the literature of the Pacific Northwest, spanning the United States and Canada. Likewise, Pease regards globalization as reaching beyond and below the nation state at the same time. He juxtaposes the flow of capital and labor with activism that is based on local initiatives in each country, but defines its goal transnationally, like the environmentalist parties Oxfam or Amnesty International (Pease 2007, 10). But if we want to study literature in light of a globalized world order, what categories— besides the larger analytic frameworks launched by a variety of “turns” in current literary and cultural studies (cf. Bieger, Saldívar, and Voelz 2013)—could replace genre, period, and author, all predicated by the nation? Levander and Levine propose “forms, spaces, [and] practices” as key terms, whereas Giles seeks to combine space and time in a geography of American literature. Giles’s spatial and cross-temporal paradigm complements, and is partially based upon, Wai Chee Dimock’s notion of “deep time,” as both scholars connect literary 42

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texts from different periods and backgrounds. All of them seek to emphasize the similarities and cultural connecting points in literature that transgress historical periods and national boundaries and claim that both have outlived their usefulness as critical tools.2 Instead, scholars have recently focused on the areas that make those crossings traceable. Fluck identifies several fields of research: “cultural hybridities and border discourses … diasporic identities (the Black Atlantic as a counter-movement to modernity) and … transculturations (the Americanization of European culture)” (Fluck, Brandt, and Thaler 2007, 1). In their variety, transnational approaches have often been associated with comparative literature. Gilman and Gruesz reject both approaches as two-way comparisons that continue to center in the United States, while other critics, rather than regarding comparative literature as an approach of its own, consider it only one among many methods of practicing Transnational American Studies (Shu and Pease 2015). In addition to transnational approaches used to reassess the literary histories of the Americas, the concept of worlding has been recently introduced by a number of scholars (cf. Wilson and Connery 2007). While the term “worlding” originates with the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1996, 59–62), it has been expanded into a critical paradigm for studying American literature in relation to a larger horizon of cultural influences and networks of human and non-human agency (cf. Hayot 2012). Engaging with ontology, the branch of philosophy that considers the nature of being and what makes human existence and reality, Heidegger states that worlding is a basic process that allows humans to make meaning of their circumstances. Instead of pure sense impressions, human beings receive meaning by engaging with the objects surrounding them in an ongoing process. As such, human beings position themselves in the world they inhabit in relationship to their “beingwith others” (Hayot 2012, 112)—understood as a becoming and gathering of both humans and non-humans. In contrast to world-systems theory based on a model of contest between center and periphery (cf. Wallerstein 2004), Heidegger’s notion of worlding offers a new field imaginary for Transnational American Studies. While the world-content of transnationalism remains frequently “wedded to the nation as the thing that it is committed to unthink” (Cherniavsky 2015, 65), worlding avoids an ethos of remapping and againstness. Instead, it rather traces relations and conditions of becoming, i.e., the entanglements and connectivity between human and object, producer and produce, use and perception in everyday life (Heidegger 1996, 71–77). Worlding—especially in Heidegger’s later work concerning technology and the environment—describes a “capacity to understand, relate to, care about and concern ourselves with the things in the world around us” (Watts 2011, 45). This relational quality distinguishes worlding from the static construct of world literature. When applied to the study of world literature, Djelal Kadir defines worlding as a critical practice, opposed to “world,” which designates only a geographical entity. Kadir contends that if the “world” of world literature “is a verb, we, who do the worlding arrogate to ourselves not only the verb’s subject agency but the world itself” (Kadir 2004, 7). To avoid a comparative point of view predicated by a specific standpoint of the observer, Gilman and Gruesz go beyond the transnational turn and argue for a “worlded analysis” that implies three scales: time, space, and language (2011, 230). In practice, many of the approaches to world literature studies have focused on a specific genre—primarily the novel, and tried to demonstrate its development empirically. While Franco Moretti’s studies (2003) of formal variations in the novel transcend national and period boundaries, they level the potential crossgeneric networks, such as cultures of reprint or transfer of texts and reading. So while traditional comparativism has often been limited to the novel, it frequently takes one side as the standard of comparison and does not account for other literary networks of production and 43

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consumption (i.e., oral literatures, theater, periodicals, etc.), or the expressive cultures of “minor transnationalism” emerging within colonialism and neocolonialism (Lionnet and Shih 2005). Using Kadir’s analogy of the “drawing-compass” (2004, 2) to circle specific literary genres or national literatures and reveal particular similarities and differences between objects of comparison, Gilman and Gruesz argue that comparative literary studies consider North America “the inevitable center and beginning” (Kadir 2004, 230). A worlding approach, however, would address multiple entanglements and modes of co-agency—persons, texts, things—while constantly shifting its centers. As a result, the United States would lose the “conceptual power that comes with being the center from which a comparison is made” (Gilman and Gruesz 2011, 230). By contrast, a worlding approach uses a larger frame of reference that makes the nation only “one point on the spatial scale … along with region, hemisphere, climactic zone, trade zone, and so on” (Gilman and Gruesz 2011, 229).3 Like Heidegger, Gilman and Gruesz use the gerund worlding as “a multilayered and dynamic process of analysis” (Gilman and Gruesz 2011, 230). Worlding remains an open activity inviting rediscriptions whenever different texts, persons, and things are examined together. As such, any study or collection of texts can only highlight a finite amount of the networks involved in each cultural production and historical situation that are potentially even more complex and layered. Accordingly, “American” literature is not only a product of confluences in the global network of cultural and literary circulation but also a node in it from which these transnational connections can be reconstructed (Levander 2013). The concept of worlding goes along with recent assumptions made by scholars in the field of transnational comparative literary studies and its move towards “postcritique” (Anker and Felski 2017). Contrary to critique (i.e., poststructuralism, new historicism, Marxism, Feminism), which refers to a specific critical practice seeking to disclose the subversive message hidden in a text, postcritical scholars promote a new “mood” or “attitude” of reading literature together with what Rita Felski calls “relational ontology” (2016, 747). Following assumptions developed by Bruno Latour and actor-network-theory, these critics do not think that what matters are the entities themselves, i.e., the text as (insurgent) object and a critique that wants “to expose hidden ideology, uncover the workings of power, encourage power, and generally contribute to social and political change” (Moi 2017, 175). Opposing critique’s “ethos of negativity” (Felski 2016, 747), a relational ontology unfolds a network of texts and the relationships between them in tandem with human and nonhuman (material) agency. Since persons, things, and texts are associated with one another and evolve together from transnational networks, Felski holds that “it is no longer a matter of looking only at texts; or of explaining those texts by invoking the box of historical-political contexts; but of tracing hybrid and heterogeneous constellations of texts, persons and things” (Felski 2016, 762). In light of postcritique’s relational thinking, worlding describes the entanglements of these constellations within multiple trajectories of mediation rather than evaluating them as expressions of a “total enworldedness” (Hayot 2012, 31) or a world system. The politics of a text are not dictated by the semantic meaning of the printed page and its representation of the world; rather they are welded in the history of diverse transnational webbings and affective co-agencies that transform the printed page into a site that enlaces countless actors and allies that gain meaning via their relations.4 Worlding is therefore distinct from the process of evaluation or critique dear to “advocates of structure” (Latour 2013, 256). Using René Magritte’s painting “The Treachery of Images” (1928/29) that shows a picture of a pipe, Latour asserts that the world does not consist of “minimal pairs” but of extended networks of animated and in-animated actors. He concludes that “neither the pipe nor the pipe in our narrative nor the briar pipe set before the painting 44

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resides simply in itself, but always in the others that precede and follow” (Latour 2013, 256). Reading the literatures of the early Americas as a multilayered network of co-agencies, attachments and afterlives “surviving centuries of wear and tear” (Felski 2016, 756) requires not only a different model of literary agency but also a need for an altered analytical attitude recognizing different cross-temporal comparisons of transnational connections.

Transnational connectivity and the early Americas Gillman and Gruesz apply their notion on worlding by examining nineteenth-century novels from France and America. This approach is not new to early American studies, as transatlantic communications between Europe and the Americas have been used routinely as a frame of reference to interpret historical, cultural, and literary developments in colonial times as well as in periodicals published from the eighteenth century onwards. Texts traveled and were published, either through networks of scribal publications (handwritten documents), reprints, or persons in Europe or the Americas, and form part of a larger circum-Atlantic literary network (cf. Shapiro). Texts have been subject to a “network of intentions” (Hall 2008, 3), involving intermediaries and cultural brokers like the printers and booksellers who took license to adapt or edit and reprint texts as they saw fit. Next to practical matters such as access to writing and print materials, economic infrastructures and political controversies determined which texts were printed or how they were altered, for example, by a printer removing controversial passages or readers cutting and pasting printed matter to compile new texts such as commonplace books. The boundaries between private and public acts of writing and publishing were fluent. A handwritten manuscript, which was meant to be privately read and distributed, could also exert public influence, as autographs were funneled through literary networks, shared among like-minded correspondents, or ended up in a print-shop often without the author’s knowledge. Handwritten poems such as elegies, for example, were ritual scripts shared among specific religious and civic groups. As such, they shaped emotional life in terms of collective forms of reading and memory. Reconsidering the “uses” of colonial elegies, Jeffrey Hammond concludes that their production, distribution, and reception forces “us … to think of a poem in premodernist terms: as something that does rather than something that is” (Hammond 2000, 8). Taken all together, these influences make it impossible to analyse literature according to categories such as authorship or originality (cf. Cambers). Instead of re-constructing original texts and their intentions, scholars of transnational print cultures propose a decentralized concept of authorship (cf. Frost and Rix 2010). Moving from work to the network in which public and private, written and oral realms overlap, and in which editors, writers, collectors, readers, and correspondents interact as nodes of redistribution and circulation, any attempts to subsume literary artifacts as building blocks for identity formations become obsolete. Decentralized concepts of authorship apply to the records of Native American storytelling that have been preserved in the documents of conquerors, priests, and literate Natives, but also in material objects.5 Present studies and anthologies underscore the fact that histories of American short narration need to be extended far beyond the colonial times to overcome the Western-centrism of even the most advanced transnational approaches.6 Throughout the Americas, Native peoples have developed elaborate traditions of both oral storytelling and writing systems, or what Friedrich Kittler calls “notation systems” (cf. Kittler 1990). Supporting the notion that narrative is a human universal, practiced in all cultures and times, González Echevarría states that like the Old Testament and Greek mythology in Western tradition, Native short narratives revolved around the origins of the world with the aim to 45

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conceive of and understand their present situation (Echevarría 1997, 4, 6–9). While many of these narratives are part of the oral tradition—stories passed on from generation to generation—some cultures developed systems for recording information. For example, the quipu, a system of strings and knots used by the Incas to record and communicate data, contains both numerical and other information in a writing system that has not yet been fully decoded. As Naomi Lindstrom presumes, the quipu could potentially also entail folktales and poetry as a cultural memory in and through its material form. Native stories have been recorded by priests, administrators, and other colonial agents, but Stephen Hart describes this process of “transliteration” (Hart 2007, 2) as afflicted by various problems: first, the writers often only imperfectly understood the Native language; second, records that were meant to cover all aspects of the life, culture, and history of ancient civilizations like the Mayas or the Aztecs can only be incomplete; and third, information was inevitably distorted through the transcriber’s perspective, prejudices, and technical limitations. While the Popol Vuh, a mid-sixteenth-century record of Guatemalan K’iche’ Maya oral traditions, was transcribed in the early eighteenth century by a Spanish priest, many Native narratives that circulated in the mid-Atlantic colonies and Canada were recorded by missionaries such as the Moravians and Jesuits. The material sources in which these native stories could be found differ according to the changing intentions pursued by their publication ranging from informing a European audience (such as missionary reports and travel accounts) to laying the foundation of postcolonial literatures in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America. Thus, Giles rightfully links the uncertainty of geographical boundaries and the mingling of ethnicities in seventeenth- through early nineteenth-century America to the ongoing cultural, economic, and political globalization starting late in the twentieth century. In contrast to the network of Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic, the French and Spanish colonies produced different types of texts but used similar strategies of narration. The French possessions in Northern America were military, missionary, and trading outposts. Yet contrary to the other European missionary endeavors that frequently ended in a fight over land for which the Native populations were vilified and decimated, French Jesuits approached their missionary activities with a different attitude: the priests lived among the different tribes in the French domain and sent back to their superiors regular reports in which they described Native life and their missionary endeavors, but also offered personal reflections. Eagerly awaited, these bundles of letters and reports became a prime source for information on the colonies and their inhabitants. While these accounts follow events of individual missionaries and native tribes, they provide a useful background to understand English experiences of migration or captivities. Often stretched out across various letters and longer reports, these accounts illustrate the hybrid and heterogeneous interactions of people, texts, and things that turn these genres into mediators shaping content through an association of formal, material, and affective inscriptions that depend not only on human actors like writers, printers, readers, but also non-human facts, i.e., food, canoes, trade routes, mapping practices, and cosmology. After their conquest, the Spanish erected a number of Viceroyalities in their South and Central American colonies in response to the expansive Aztec, Inca, and Mayan empires they encountered. Similar to the French, the Spanish explorers, military commanders, administrators, and printers circulated letters, records, and annuals among their superiors in which they dramatized their role in the conquest, but they also included a number of narrative episodes. Their perspectives were countered, however, by racially mixed historians and writers like Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca (1539–1616), who used the conqueror’s hegemonic practices of print to reassess the Spanish claim of superiority (cf. Bauer and Mazzoti 2009). In 46

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North America, Native tribes were less of a threat to the settlers’ expansion as they participated in shifting political and trade alliances during the frequent border conflicts between the French and British empires. Treaties were one early genre of colonial Native interactions that often contained elaborate passages describing negotiations, living conditions, and tribal customs. While these treaties did not contain narratives, some of their elements have been used in stories or collected as “Indian oratory” in magazines and other later publications and Native American performances like Hanay Geiogamah’s play Foghorn (1973; cf. Scheiding 2015b, 141–143). During the Enlightenment, Native Americans came to represent the perfect harmony between humankind and nature, which resulted in an increasing popularity of Native American representations throughout Europe and North America. The forceful relocation of once numerous tribes and the repression of any Native resistance led to their marginalization, indicated also by the myth of the “vanishing” but “noble Indian” as expressed in nineteenth-century historical novels on both sides of the Atlantic. Other stories portray wise and deeply moral Native characters, such as “Azakia: A Canadian Story” (1765), an original French story translated into German and English, and “Yonora: An American Tale” (1797). At the same time, these tales hint at the pluralities of migrant stories that circulate in both Euro-American and Native American periodicals and whose subtitles indicate different local attachments and emotional ties (Scheiding 2019, forthcoming). Since the earliest colonial times, millions of Africans were enslaved and brought to the Americas to work in plantations and households as indentured servants. The atrocities of the middle passage as well as the exploitation and cruel treatment by slave owners and traders can be found in narratives, like “Zimeo: A Tale” (1789) and many slave narratives of that time. The Caribbean became a place in which many of these narratives dealt with themes of exploitation, slave rebellion and the maroon communities of fugitive slaves on Jamaica and Haiti (cf. Goudie 2006). Simultaneously, the global movement of abolitionism shows how narratives can be used to a political end, as for instance, in black Caribbean newspapers and their cutting, tailoring, and embellishing of printed matter. As diverse as the readerships were, global colonialism witnessed a rise in public participation in the print market, especially through religious pamphlets and the transnational traffic of serialized prints. Newspapers and magazines have relied on a network of correspondents for local stories, opinion pieces, letters, poetry, and tales. Many seasoned writers and editors, but also first-time authors, both female and male, have filled the pages of the magazines with their own stories or the copying of popular foreign stories, mostly published anonymously. Similar to the decentralized authorship of the early Americas, with little regard for author or “ownership,” the exchange, adaptation, and dissemination of textual and visual artefacts in periodicals remind critics of the fluid and participatory culture of the internet age with its swarming aggregates of people, texts and things (Powell 2012, 241; Scheiding 2015a).

Conclusion The relational mode of worlding America encourages Transnational American Studies to engage cross-temporal literary comparisons to study the “swirling confusion of texts, objects, ideas, and images that have weathered the forces of time” (Felski 2016, 756). Worlding immerses in the exchange of ideas, people, and goods across temporal and spatial boundaries, and understands texts as dynamic actors evolving from these movements themselves through translation, affective ties, and countless allies. These relations result in a new understanding of texts not so much as a work that can be ascribed to a particular author, place, and time of publication, but rather as an “archive of operative work” (Derrida 2005, 42) shaped by 47

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human and non-human interactions across time and space. In doing so, this chapter intended to call attention to the heterogeneous textual assemblages that characterize the literatures of the early Americas, which emerged from complex cultural translations and traffic. It asked questions about how migrant texts have been re-classified by editors, readers, and writers for changing audiences, times, and circumstances. “American” literature is less a national creation than a product of multiple co-agencies and interventions. “Willing to risk charges of anachronism in order to trace proximity and connection” between the past and the present (Felski 2016, 756), it remains to be seen whether the concept of worlding moves toward imagining Transnational American Studies in the context of the planet’s connectivity and changes the way we think about agency, materiality, and textuality.

Notes 1 Network refers here to mixed assemblies, interconnections, and co-creations of texts, things, and persons. Caroline Levine emphasizes that “networks are the forms that rupture or defy enclosed totalities and allow us to understand border-crossing circulations and transmissions” (Levine 2015, 117). 2 See Giles’s discussion of nationalism as a construct and Dimock’s argument that periodizations neglect the interrelationship and influence of literary texts beyond their time of production (Giles 2011, 3; Dimock 2001). For a critical evaluation of the concept of global literature see Prendergast (2001) and White (2008). 3 The term has also been used in a slightly different sense by Bruce Robbins. He argues that novels following 9/11 retreat from the world by concentrating on the domestic and internal. Yet as a critical concept, worlding implies the world as the horizon for analysing literary production and circulation rather than a matter of its content. 4 In his anthropology of the moderns, Bruno Latour comprehends the symbolic world of art and fiction in terms of “being-as-other.” As such, “Being-as-other, in fact, alters itself and renews itself; it is never in itself but always in and through others” (Latour 2013, 255). According to Juliet Fleming, literature serves as “an ongoing bringing-forth of the world through a process of living in and through the dynamic organization of its spatial archive” (Fleming 2016, 62). Reflecting on the page as a theatrical scene, Jacques Derrida asserts that “[p]aper is the support not only for marks but for a complex ‘operation’— spatial and temporal; visible, tangible, and often sonorous; active but also passive (something other than an ‘operation,’ then, the becoming-opus or the archive of operative work)” (Fleming 2016, 42). 5 Anthologies of Native American literature have shifted from oral traditions to include Native literacies, see Bross and Wyss (2008). For more information on South American Native traditions, see Echevarría and Foster; for more information on how textual and non-textual literatures interacted in colonial North and South America, see Cohen and Glover (2014). 6 See, for example, Dimock (2009) who argues that a hemispheric approach necessarily reproduces a Western literary perspective and excludes any possible cultural and literary relationships with “Eastern” cultures. The same argument of the predominant Western and modern perspective could be made about scholarship of North American literature that excludes anything predating Western literary tradition and settlement (cf. Scheiding and Seidl 2015).

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Worlding America and TAS Bross, Kristina, and Hilary E. Wyss, eds. Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. Cambers, Andrew. Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Cherniavsky, Eva. “Post-Soviet American Studies.” American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning toward the Transpacific. Eds. Yuan Shu and Donald E. Pease. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 2015. 64–83. Cohen, Matt, and Jeffrey Glover. Colonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early Americas. Lincoln, NE: The University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Derrida, Jacques. Paper Machine. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Dimock, Wai Chee. “Deep Time: American Literature and World History.” American Literary History 13. 4 (2001): 755–775. Dimock, Wai Chee. “Hemispheric Islam: Continents and Centuries for American Literature.” American Literary History 21. 1 (2009): 28–52. Djelal, Kadir. “To World, To Globalize––Comparative Literature’s Crossroads.” Comparative Literature Studies 41. 1 (2004): 1–9. Echevarría, Roberto G., ed. The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Felski, Rita. “Comparison and Translation: A Perspective from Actor-Network Theory.” Comparative Literature Studies 53. 4 (2016): 747–765. Fleming, Juliet. Cultural Graphology: Writing after Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Flint, Christopher. The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Fluck, Winfried, Stefan Brandt, and Ingrid Thaler. “Introduction: The Challenges of Transnational American Studies.” REAL 23 (2007): 1–9. Fluck, Winfried, Stefan Brandt, and Ingrid Thaler. “Theories of American Culture (and the Transnational Turn in American Studies).” REAL 23 (2007): 59–77. Foster, David William, ed. Literatura Hispanoamerica. New York and London: Garland, 1994. Frost, Simon, and Robert Rix, eds. Moveable Type, Mobile Nations: Interactions in Transnational Book History. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010. Giles, Paul. The Global Remapping of American Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Gilman, Susan, and Kirsten S. Gruesz. “Worlding America: The Hemispheric Text-Network.” A Companion to American Literary Studies. Ed. Caroline F. Levander. Chichester: Wiley, 2011. 228–247. Goudie, Sean X. Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Hall, David D. Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Hammond, Jeffrey A. The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and Cultural Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Hart, Stephen M. A Companion to Latin American Literature. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2007. Hayot, Eric. On Literary Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Hebel, Udo, ed. Transnational American Studies. Heidelberg: Winter, 2012. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York, 1996. Kittler, Friedrich A. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. Levander, Caroline F. Where is American Literature? Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2013. Levander, Caroline F, and Robert S. Levine. “Introduction.” A Companion to American Literary Studies. Ed. Caroline F. Levander. Chichester: Wiley, 2011. 1–12. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Lindstrom, Naomi. Early Spanish American Narrative. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-meih Shih, eds. Minor Transnationalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Moi, Toril. Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Moretti, Franco. “Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History—1.” New Left Review 24 (Nov./Dec. 2003): 67–93.

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Oliver Scheiding Pease, Donald. “From American Literary Studies to Planetary Literature: The Emergence of Literary Extraterritoriality.” REAL 23 (2007): 9–35. Powell, Manushag N. Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2012. Prendergast, Christopher. “Negotiating World Literature.” New Left Review 8 (March–April 2001): 100–121. Robbins, Bruce. “The Worlding of the American Novel.” The Cambridge History of the American Novel. Ed. Leonard Cassuto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 1096–1106. Scheiding, Oliver. “‘Small Tales’: Brevity and Liminality in Early American Magazines.” Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing. Eds. Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann. New York and London: Routledge, 2015a. 121–133. Scheiding, Oliver. “Native Letters and North American Indian Wars.” The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen. New York: Routledge, 2015b. 135–145. Scheiding, Oliver. “Nineteenth-Century American Indian Newspapers and the Construction of Sovereignty.” Cambridge History of Native American Literature. Ed. Melanie Benson Taylor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Forthcoming. Scheiding, Oliver, and Martin Seidl, eds. Worlding America: A Transnational Anthology of Short Narratives before 1800. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. Shapiro, Stephen. The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Shih, Shu-meih. “Comparison as Relation.” Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses. Eds. Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. 79–98. Shu, Yuan, and Donald E. Pease, eds. American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning toward the Transpacific. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2015. Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004. Watts, Michael. The Philosophy of Heidegger. New York: Routledge, 2011. White, Hayden. “Commentary: ‘With no particular place to go’: Literary History in the Age of the Global Picture.” American Literary History 39 (2008): 727–745. Wilson, Rob and Christopher Leigh Connery, eds. The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization. Berkeley, CA: New Pacific Press, 2007.

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4 ARCHIPELAGIC AMERICAN STUDIES An open and comparative insularity Brian Russell Roberts

Introduction According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word insular, derived from the Latin insula, is first and foremost the adjectival form of the noun island. The OED has insular’s first definition as: “Of or pertaining to an island; inhabiting or situated on an island” (OED Online: “insular” 1.a). The definition seems straightforward and impartially descriptive enough, but as most English-speakers know, this adjectival form of the word island, when deployed metaphorically, is almost always condescending. The condescension surfaces clearly in the OED’s fourth and final definition for the term insular: “Pertaining to islanders; esp. having the characteristic traits of the inhabitants of an island (e.g. of Great Britain); cut off from intercourse with other nations, isolated; self-contained; narrow or prejudiced in feelings, ideas, or manners” (OED Online: “insular” 4.a). If this final definition were not so altogether familiar, its irony would be surprising. Peeling ourselves away from English’s naturalized pejorative stance regarding insularity or islandness, and recalling that this stance is not natural but rather grows out of specific historical and cultural processes, we might ask: Why would English, as a language originating on an island, naturalize a sense of loathing toward its geography of origin? This type of linguistically encoded anti-insularity would feel unsurprising, even expected, among several languages of the European continent. And indeed it is true that the French, Spanish, and German terms for island can be used in ways analogous to English’s pejorative sense. But for English to acquiesce to this pejorative definition of insularity seems like an uncharacteristic capitulation to the continent’s claims to superiority, a strange admission that Britain’s islandness somehow attests to a naturally inferior status vis-à-vis its rivals on the putatively superior continent. How, then, did English attain this linguistically encoded loathing for its own island origins? For a partial answer, I would point toward the influence of the British colonies in North America. During the eighteenth century, many colonists and revolutionaries in North America were thinking continentally, speaking and writing in ways that were refashioning English in distinctly anti-insular terms aimed specifically at Britain. Recall that the North American revolutionaries referred to their congress and army as the Continental Congress and the Continental Army, and contextualize this recollection with some of 51

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Thomas Paine’s revolutionary statements in the 1776 pamphlet Common Sense: “Small islands not capable of protecting themselves, are the proper objects for kingdoms to take under their care; but there is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island” (Paine 90–91). In this pamphlet, which saturated the reading public of British North America, Paine deplored seemingly narrow British affronts to Americans’ allegedly broad “continental minds.” He explained that “in this extensive quarter of the globe, we forget the narrow limits of three hundred and sixty miles (the extent of England) and carry on our friendship on a larger scale” (Paine 1986[1776], 85). Here, Paine’s assessment of Britain’s islandness converges with the OED’s final definition of insularity. And in light of such proto-US-American comparisons between the putatively superior form of the continent and the ostensibly inferior form of the island, it seems telling that the OED first marks English’s pejorative use of the term insular in 1775, a year after the colonists valorized their congress as continental in a rhetorical move that was calculated not only to underscore unity among the colonies but also to cast aspersions on British islandness or insularity.1 The pejorative sense of the term insular has found fertile ground in English as continentally-minded American speakers have outnumbered British speakers. And, as Michelle Ann Stephens and I have observed elsewhere, the pejorative sense of the term has also attained a notable place in the field imaginary of Transnational American Studies, as some of the field’s most prominent transnationalist voices have repeatedly distanced themselves from previous generations of American Studies scholars by referring to older Americanist scholarship as insular. Indeed, the term insular appears frequently and almost rhythmically in transnational Americanist assessments of earlier eras, contrasting an earlier “insular” American Studies that was border-bound against a valorized outward-looking Americanist transnationalism. In these transnational Americanist assessments, the term insular is paired with an array of vexed attributes: the static, the self-enclosed, the parochial, the nationalist, and the disembedded (Roberts and Stephens 2013, 3; Roberts 2013, 124).2 These attributes are insularity’s negative accruals as the concept of islandness has found framing within an English reinflected by an Americanism that is built, as is showcased in Paine’s statements, on a sense of the grandeur of continental space. Indeed, one might refer to this static, selfenclosed, parochial, and disembedded conception of insularity as a continentalized view of the geographical form of the island. And in light of this anti-insular Americanization of the English language, it is unsurprising that the US Supreme Court, when handling the set of post-Spanish-American War cases called the Insular Cases, found that the US Constitution did not follow the flag to the new US possessions of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Rather, armed from the outset with a continentalized and pejorative view of the insularity of the spaces it was contemplating, the Supreme Court bestowed upon these island possessions the vexed status of “foreign…in a domestic sense” (quoted in Burnett and Marshall 2001, 1). But what would a de-continentalized view of islandness look like? One entrance into such a view comes through a writer of postcolonial archipelagic American French, the Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant. Glissant’s 1981 Le Discours antillais explains: Ordinarily, we look at insularity as a mode of isolation, a sort of spatial neurosis. In the Caribbean, however, each island is an opening […]. It is only for those anchored to the European continent that insularity equals imprisonment. The Antillean imaginary frees us from suffocation. (Glissant 1981, 427; trans., Glover 2010, 1) 52

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Rather than acquiescing to the European continent’s pejorative stance on insularity, Glissant re-envisions insularity from his position among the islands of the Caribbean. Here, an island is not self-enclosed and narrow but is, rather, “an opening.” When considered in the context of Glissant’s view of insularity, the question that is often implicitly asked in transnational Americanist discussions (i.e., how can American Studies become less insular?) needs to fall by the wayside. In its place, I would suggest another set of questions: What would happen if American Studies scholars turned away from easy reliance on Paine’s continentalized stance on islandness and instead considered Glissant’s decontinentalized insularity? What shifts might take place in American Studies if scholars were to proceed from the assumption of a distinctly open insularity? How would Americanist treatments of island spaces (including the oft-discussed Insular Cases) change as a result of this decontinentalized view of insularity? In terms of scholarly practice and political engagement, what precisely might it mean to understand each island as “an opening”? In approaching these and other questions, Stephens and I have edited a collection of some 20 essays titled Archipelagic American Studies, in which we describe “the archipelagic Americas” as “the temporally shifting and spatially splayed set of islands, island chains, and island-oceancontinent relations” which have included the cultures of US imperialism but have more broadly “exceeded US-Americanism and have been affiliated with and indeed constitutive of competing notions of the Americas since at least 1492” (Roberts and Stephens 2017, 1). Archipelagic American Studies, then, becomes: a mode of American studies dedicated to tracing the interrelations of America (as a contingent and elastic space constellated by oceanic waterways, two continents, and uncounted islands both within the hemisphere and beyond via the sinews of empire) and the broader planetary archipelago. This tracing of the interactive and constitutive relationships between (to borrow a phrase from W. E. B. Du Bois) “America and the islands of the sea” holds in productive tension the insights produced by such newly emerging fields as island studies and ocean studies, attentive to the materialities of archipelagic existence as well as to the ways in which the island’s wide deployment as a metaphor has continually exerted influence on those materialities. (Roberts and Stephens 2017, 10) The collection shares (and plots multiple points of relationship between) the Caribbean-based vectors of archipelagic concern that surface in the American Quarterly’s 2014 Las Américas Quarterly special issue, and the Pacific-based archipelagic inquiries of the same journal’s 2015 Pacific Currents special issue. The open, comparative insularity of this approach to American Studies permits an archipelagic interlacing of transnationalism’s set of new regionalisms. An archipelagic American Studies re-envisions these new regionalisms as, to borrow from Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s description of an archipelago, existing in an interdependent state of “discontinuous conjunction” (Benítez-Rojo 1996, 2). As Chamorro poet and scholar Craig Santos Perez has written: “This archipelagic turn offers a promising analytic to navigate the transnational, transatlantic, transpacific, transindigenous, and transhemispheric turns in the now discontiguous archipelago of American studies” (Perez 2015, 619). Viewing each island as an opening, the archipelagic frame may stitch together multiple micro-regional sites (i.e., individual islands and other specific littoral and pelagic spaces) not into a transnational macroregion (e.g. the transpacific or transatlantic, the hemispheric or the circum-Caribbean) but into a terraqueous network cutting across region in which island-openings ranging from Java 53

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in Indonesia to Iceland in the North Atlantic may facilitate and invite comparative commentary on their conjunctions and disjunctions, similarities and variations, collisions and clefts, all within contexts that both illuminate and exceed questions of colonialism and postcolonialism, environmental degradation and environmental stewardship, neoliberalism and radical politics, and cosmopolitanism and créolité. But again, in terms of scholarly practice and political engagement, what precisely might it mean to understand islands as openings that function regionally and transregionally, existing as archipelagic links within and across oceanic and continental spaces? To start, one must understand that Glissant’s notion of the island-opening is a far cry from the mode of thought that is critiqued by Cook Island Puka-Pukan writer Florence “Johnny” Frisbie in her 1948 novelistic memoir Miss Ulysses from Puka-Puka: I have heard traders […] say that when you have seen one atoll you have seen them all; but that sort of people sees nothing in an island except copra, shell, pearls, home-brew, and women […]. What they mean is that copra and trade, beer and women are the same on all islands. (Frisbie 1948, 185) Against the traders’ continentalist view of island interchangeability, one might consider the mode of comparison discussed by Benedict Anderson in The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (Anderson 1998).3 As described by Anderson, this comparative mode can elicit “a kind of vertigo” or a “dizzying moment” as it interferes with efforts to “matter-of-factly experience” the here and now, asking us to see “simultaneously close up and from afar.” Anderson’s first metaphor for this mode of comparison is “an inverted telescope,” a mode of seeing he first experienced in the archipelagic Southeast Asian nation of Indonesia in 1963 as he heard President Soekarno praising Hitler as “clever.” Anderson’s second metaphor for this mode of comparison is “the spectre of comparisons,” a phrase he draws and translates from Filipino patriot José Rizal’s phrase, in the 1887 novel Noli Me Tángere, “el demonio de las comparaciones” (Anderson 1998, 2). Anderson names his comparative heuristic for Rizal’s phrase, even if he does not quote substantially from the scene. But I want to do so in order to draw out the unstated archipelagic implications of Anderson’s comparative approach. In Noli Me Tángere, the mestizo hero Ibarra has recently returned to Manila after seven years in Europe, and his sensory experience of the city reminds him of his youth spent in the Philippines. But the sight of Manila’s: botanical garden drove away his cheerful memories: the spectre/devil of comparisons placed him before the botanical gardens of Europe, among the countries where a great deal of willpower and much gold is needed to coax a leaf to sprout or a flower to open its calyx; even more, this applied to the gardens of the faraway colonies, rich and well-tended and open, all of them, to the public… The view of the sea disappearing in the distance! “On the far shore is Europe!” thought the young man. (Rizal 1887, 43)4 Here, the protagonist compares Europe and the Philippines, or the nations of Europe and the colonies more generally. This is not a comparison in which (to borrow I. A. Richards’s classic terminology regarding metaphor) Europe is the vehicle for the tenor of the colonies, nor are the colonies the vehicle for the tenor of Europe. Rather, the nations of Europe and the 54

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colonies are brought into comparison via a specific spatial genre, the garden, which serves as an analogical trigger (an opening for comparison) between the two sets of spaces. In a similar way, though he leaves it unacknowledged, Anderson’s very notion of comparison—which hinges on a comparison between first a vertiginous experience in Indonesia and then a dizzying reading of a foundational novel of the Philippines—is triggered and subtended by a spatial genre, that of the nationalized archipelago, which is a category innovated and championed by both the Philippines and Indonesia. As an Indonesianist by training, Anderson found his geographical starting place in the genre of the archipelago. His usually implicit comparative geographical assumptions become, briefly, explicit at a certain point in The Spectre of Comparisons while he compares Indonesia and Burma: “Burma had the ill-luck not to be a free-floating archipelago” (Anderson 1998, 327). Here, the archipelago—and not the continental site—emerges as the default geography. Reading Anderson thus, one arrives at a handful of ways in which islands become, in Glissant’s term, openings. On one hand, within the context of American Studies, noting the comparative priority Anderson gives to archipelagic space offers a new vista onto continentisland relationality, with this new relationality emerging as something of a photographic negative vis-à-vis the traditional view: now Canada (with its vast 36,000-island Arctic Archipelago) and the United States (which due largely to its sprawling archipelagic holdings controls more ocean territory than nearly any other country) might not exist as continental nations with some affiliated insular afterthoughts, but rather be reconceived as archipelagic nations that are each also affiliated with a portion of the North American continent. One might also look, as Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel has done, to the fact that certain colonialera maps referred to the present-day Caribbean as the Mexican Archipelago (Martínez-San Miguel 2017, 157–165), and wonder about the contingent (and theoretically reversible) cultural-historical processes that gave priority to a continental Mexico rather than a now forgotten archipelagic imagination of Mexico. Furthermore, and having a great deal to do with how Americanists might go about theorizing linkages among these various arenas of the archipelagic Americas, examining the source text for Anderson’s comparative heuristic reveals the way in which a spatial genre (for Ibarra the garden, for Anderson the archipelago) may serve as an opening, an analogical trigger prompting otherwise unforecasted comparisons that do not see islands as interchangeable but rather apprehend islands as existing within a planetary archipelago that is as rife with discontinuity as it is with conjunction. To illustrate how the island-opening functions as a spatial genre and analogical trigger that cuts across region and instigates the formation of transregional insular associations or archipelagoes, I want to devote space to imagining one such assemblage. This assemblage, or series of insular interlinkings, reveals the archipelagic frame as attaining purchase not only in regard to inter-island relationality but also, and perhaps more surprisingly, in relation to islandcontinent relationality. Willa Cather’s 1918 novel My Ántonia has been praised as the culmination of her “west authentic” aesthetic (Stegner 1997, 237), and its narrator, Jim Burden, is someone of a preponderantly US-continental mindset: as an adult “he goes off into the wilds hunting for lost parks or exploring new canyons,” he is “still able to lose himself in those big Western dreams,” and his “interest in women is as youthful as it is Western and American” (Cather 2006, 6). Indeed, his dedication to a continental mindset is such that he recalls in the novel that as a boy working the farm in Nebraska, “I got ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and tried to read, but his life on the island seemed dull compared with ours” (Cather 2006, 59). Meanwhile, his winter expeditions to the middle of an iced-over river—when “we skated up to the big island and made bonfires on the frozen sand”—merit only a single sentence in the novel 55

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(Cather 2006, 100). And yet in spite of Jim Burden’s continentalism, his recollections of Crusoe and the riverine island forge a link between the geographical thematics of My Ántonia and those of another piece of fiction in Cather’s oeuvre, her 1902 short story “The Treasure of Far Island,” which focuses on two childhood friends’ return, now as adults, to Far Island, “an oval sand bar, half a mile in length and perhaps a hundred yards wide, which lies about two miles up from Empire City in a turbid little Nebraska river.” As the narrator explains, [t]he island is known chiefly to the children who dwell in that region, and generation after generation of them have claimed it; fished there, and pitched their tents under the great arched tree, and built camp fires on its level, sandy outskirts […]. Every summer a new chief claims it and it has been called by many names. (Cather 1970, 265) As if the description of a successively reclaimed island in the shadow of a place called Empire City weren’t enough to suggest a link between this 1902 short story and the United States’ contemporaneous wars in the Philippines over Spanish and Filipino claims to the archipelago, the story has the co-protagonists recalling that one of their childhood friends “is commanding a regiment in the Philippines” (Cather 1970, 277), and it has them unearthing an old treasure chest that they buried years ago, containing, among other items, an alleged “Spaniard’s heart in a bottle of alcohol” (Cather 1979, 280). No doubt the alcohol-preserved “heart” was buried as a token of one of their fanciful gothic adventures during childhood, but now, in a story published during the first years of the twentieth century, the Spaniard’s heart emerges from the sandy shores of Far Island with new valences in light of the Spanish-American and Philippines-American Wars, simultaneously romanticizing and criticizing the US fight for the islands, against the Spanish colonialists and the First Philippine Republic, as an adult version of child’s play. A critical attentiveness to the spatial genre of the island, then, unexpectedly links the continentally oriented narrative economy of My Ántonia to a continentally oriented US political economy that at the turn of the century found itself nonplussed, as Susan K. Harris has illustrated in God’s Arbiters (Harris 2013), by the United States’ ultimate goals in asserting control over the Philippines archipelago. From thence, the insular interlinking continues, say, to a 1903 short story published by Frank R. Steward in The Colored American Magazine. Steward served as a captain in the US military in the Philippines during the PhilippinesAmerican War and became a provost judge in the Philippine city of San Pablo (Logan 1982, 569).5 His story, “The Men Who Prey,” tells of Duncan Lane, a white captain who, leaving his wife behind in Texas during the Philippines-American War, begins “matrimoning”—or concubining—with a Filipina woman named Jacinta. As the omniscient narrator describes it, Jacinta holds fast to a dream of a big ship, a long journey, railroad cars swift-running, great cities, wonders and marvels without end in the land of the Americanos, and amid all a large house in the far-off country, numerous servants, and a husband so tall, so loving, so white. (Steward 1903, 723) In this description, we see Steward projecting the subjectivity of a Filipina woman imagining a vast “land of the Americanos,” as continentally attuned adjectives of magnitude (such as big, large, and tall) stack one on top of the other, culminating in the sublime whiteness (viewed admiringly by Jacinta and cynically by Steward) of the Americanos’ continental space. 56

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Jacinta’s image of the vast land of the Americanos contrasts implicitly the Filipina/o worldview described by prominent Filipino writer and historian Nick Joaquin in the essay “A Heritage of Smallness”: for Filipinos, “society…is a small rowboat,” “geography…is a small locality,” “enterprise […] is a small stall,” “industry and production […] are the small searchings of each day,” and “commerce […] is the smallest degree of retail” (Joaquin 1988, 217). Bootlessly longing for white American continental grandeur, as Steward represents it, Jacinta remains confined to her small non-white world on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. Yet as confined as she may feel, the very sense of confinement is a critical opening to another—tropologically analogous—island, an island of confinement that is also racialized. In his 1941 book 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States, black US writer and intellectual Richard Wright observes: “The word ‘Negro,’ the term by which, orally or in print, we black folk in the United States are usually designated, is not really a name at all nor a description, but a psychological island.” “This island,” Wright explains, “… is situated in the midst of the sea of white faces we meet each day; and…its rocky boundaries have remained unyielding to the waves of our hope that dash against it” (Wright 2002, 41). Using the figure of the island to convey a sense of isolation is common enough, and is consistent with Chicago School sociologist Robert E. Park’s commentary during his 1932 commencement address at the University of Hawai‘i, when he drew an analogy between Hawai‘i’s “rigidly defined […] geographical location” and the sonnet form’s “rigorous limitations” (Park 1932, 698). And yet, the fact that innumerable islands are interlinked by representations of island-confinement belies the very sense of isolation asserted by the clichéd representation. Crusoe’s seemingly isolated island in My Ántonia is fundamentally archipelagic, linking up with Far Island of Cather’s short story, which links up with Jacinta’s island in “The Men Who Prey,” which links up with Wright’s island in 12 Million Black Voices and Park’s image of Hawai‘i as an island-sonnet. Indeed, the putatively isolated island is itself so ineluctably linked to uncounted other islands that, rather than following Park in looking toward the self-contained sonnet for a poetic allegory of the island, we might look toward the first paragraph of Steward’s story of Duncan Lane and Jacinta, which is written as follows: You know the giddy youth who makes sport of the hearts of women; and the rake with his mournful wake of passion-wrecked victims. Yet the hearts they break and the souls they take are women who understand. But what will you say of the men who prey upon the brown children of the bosky? (Steward 1903, 720) The paragraph’s rhyme and rhythm mark it as a ballad disguised as prose, as is revealed by the realignments produced by a handful of added line- and stanza-breaks: You know the giddy youth who makes Sport of the hearts of women; And the rake with his mournful wake Of passion-wrecked victims. Yet the hearts they break and the souls they take Are women who understand. But what will you say of the men who prey Upon the brown children of the bosky? 57

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Of these men who prey, Du Bois would say, as he did in a December 1925 Crisis editorial, that they were “American skunks scuttl[ing] from the island and leav[ing] their helpless and innocent bastards to beg and perish, and their deserted mothers to starve or serve as prostitutes to white newcomers” (Du Bois 1925, 61). Steward’s two-stanza ballad—which is suggestively replete with serialized asymmetrical relationships of gendered and racialized varieties—is one that might extend indefinitely, with new stanzas appended to previous stanzas in a theoretically endless procession, operating not linearly but instead branching out, cutting back, and cutting across and through the many islands of archipelagic American space. And regarding the ballad as a genre, its stanzas might be taken as a model of island-openings, varying in content across time and space while maintaining formal variations and similarities from stanza to stanza, hanging together like an archipelago, in which the story of the archipelagic Americas and their interactions with the planetary archipelago is a transregional and multidirectional network of connections among microregional spaces. This is an ever multiplying set of spaces and relationalities which, as Monique Allewaert has suggested in her description of an archipelagic American approach, proposes that totality cannot be reduced to one—the nation or the globe or the world—since it is produced through relays between many islands that give rise to alternate modernities that are in relay with, yet also exceed, existing totalities, whether global or local. (Allewaert 2016, 126) Like the ballad stanzas that sit disguised as prose at the beginning of Steward’s short story, the archipelagic Americas and their relation to the planetary archipelago have existed as largely illegible within an Americanist transnationalism that often sees islands as insular in the pejorative sense and has followed, though usually unintentionally, the precedent set by Paine and others in framing continental vastness as the measuring stick. Recalling the term insular’s shift toward the pejorative, as the continuum moved from British to American English, one might imagine the potential for another tectonic shift in the term’s use, also brought about by a change in English-speakers’ demographics. When Richard Wright attended the postcolonial Bandung Conference held in Indonesia in 1955, he listened to the variety of Englishes spoken by representatives of the conference’s 29 Asian and African participant countries and wrote in his 1956 travelogue The Color Curtain: I felt while at Bandung that the English language was about to undergo one of the most severe tests in its long and glorious history. Not only was English becoming the common, dominant tongue of the globe, but it was evident that soon there would be more people speaking English than there were people whose native tongue was English […]. Alien pressures and structures of thought and feeling will be brought to bear upon this our mother tongue and we shall be hearing some strange and twisted expressions …. But this is all to the good; a language is useless unless it can be used for the vital purposes of life, and to use a language in new situations is, inevitably, to change it. (Wright 1994, 200) For expressions that may seem “strange and twisted” to some American or British Englishspeakers, I have in this essay drawn on Glissant’s archipelagic French and Rizal’s archipelagic 58

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Spanish, seeking to counteract what Filipino law scholar Jay Batongbacal has critiqued as “the weight of decades of biases brought about by training in disciplines developed and dominated by Western continental countries” (Batongbacal 1998, 183). From here Americanists might also consider the potential payoffs of giving increased attention to archipelagic Englishes—not merely to the archipelagic English of the British Isles (as John Kerrigan has gestured toward (Kerrigan 2008)) but to the variety of archipelagic Englishes associated with, say, the Caribbean, the Philippines, and Hawai‘i, as well as with other archipelagic regions across the planet where English is less naturalized but still functions as a lingua franca in certain circumstances. How might these Englishes—influenced by structures of thought and feeling associated with archipelagic languages such as Hawaiian, Tagalog, indigenous Caribbean languages, and Indonesian, among others—not only roll back the current pejorative valences of the English term insular but also, and more importantly for Transnational American Studies, help Americanists to decontinentalize our implicit and pervasive assumptions regarding island-continent relationality? Within an American Studies that is attentive to the planet’s archipelagic Englishes and these Englishes’ translational interactions with other island-affiliated languages, the following question may not be merely “strange and twisted” but also urgent: How can American Studies become more insular? 6

Notes 1 In 1623 John Donne famously offered the following: No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or thine own were. (Donne 1999, 103)

2

3 4 5 6

This pejoratively torqued use of the island metaphor, no doubt betokening a sympathy with continental Europe, assures us that English already harbored a sense of anti-insularity before the 1770s. Beyond the question of insularity’s meaning, the standard transnational Americanist narrative of midcentury American Studies as closed-off and border-bound is complicated by a glance at the first issue of American Quarterly (Spring 1949), which contains eight articles, all of which have strong transnational orientations or valences, with titles such as “American Influences on Contemporary Italian Literature,” “On What It Is to Be French,” and “The Projection of America Abroad.” In thinking through the place of the archipelago in relation to Anderson’s comparative framework, I have benefited from email discussions with Susan Gillman. For an excellent discussion of Anderson, comparison, and archipelagic form, see Gillman (2017). My translation from Rizal’s Spanish. For commentary on Steward and his literary output, see Murphy (2010, 87–120); and Gruesser (2012, 76–82). For an extended discussion of the questions raised in this paragraph, see my essay “What Is an Archipelago? On Bandung Praxis, Lingua Franca, and Archipelagic Interlapping,” in Archipelagic Thinking: Towards New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations, eds. Michelle Ann Stephens and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel (forthcoming).

Bibliography Allewaert, Monique. “The Geopolitics and Tropologies of the American Turn.” Turns of Event: NineteenthCentury American Literary Studies in Motion. Ed. Hester Blum. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 111–126. Anderson, Benedict. The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World. London: Verso, 1998. Batongbacal, Jay. “Defining Archipelagic Studies.” Archipelagic Studies: Charting New Waters. Ed. Jay L. Batongbacal. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Printery, 1998. 183–194.

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Brian Russell Roberts Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. 2nd Edition. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Burnett, Christina Duffy and Burke Marshall. “Between the Foreign and the Domestic: The Doctrine of Territorial Incorporation, Invented and Reinvented.” Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution. Eds. Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. 1–36. Cather, Willa. My Ántonia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Cather, Willa. “The Treasure of Far Island.” Willa Cather’s Collected Short Fiction, 1892–1912. Ed. Virginia Faulkner. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970. 265–282. Donne, John. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and Death’s Duel. New York: Vintage Classics, 1999. Du Bois, W. E. B. “Philippine Mullatoes.” Crisis (Dec. 1925): 61. Frisbie, Florence. Miss Ulysses from Puka-Puka: The Autobiography of a South Sea Trader’s Daughter. New York: Macmillan, 1948. Gillman, Susan. “It Takes an Archipelago to Compare Otherwise.” Archipelagic American Studies. Eds. Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. 133–151. Glissant, Édouard. Le Discours antillais. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. Glover, Kaiama. Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010. Gruesser, John Cullen. The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home: African American Literature and the Era of Overseas Expansion. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. Harris, Susan. God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898–1902. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Joaquín, Nick. Culture and History: Occasional Notes on the Process of Becoming Filipino. Manila: Solar Publishing, 1988. Kerrigan, John. Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics, 1603–1707. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Logan, Rayford. “Steward, Frank Rudolph.” Dictionary of American Negro Biography. Ed. Rayford Logan and Michael Winston. New York: Norton, 1982. 569. Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda. “Colonial and Mexican Archipelagoes: Reimagining Colonial Caribbean Studies.” Archipelagic American Studies. Eds. Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. 155–173. Murphy, Gretchen. Shadowing the White Man’s Burden: U.S. Imperialism and the Problem of the Color Line. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. Ed. Isaac Kramnick. London: Penguin Classics, 1986. Park, Robert. “The University and the Community of Races.” Pacific Affairs (Aug. 1932): 695–703. Perez, Craig. “Transterritorial Currents and the Imperial Terripelago.” American Quarterly67. 3 (2015): 619–624. Rizal, José. Noli Me Tángere: Novela Tagala, Berlin: Berliner Buchdruckerei-Aktiengesellschaft, 1887. Roberts, Brian Russell. “Archipelagic Diaspora, Geographical Form, and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” American Literature85. 1 (2013): 129–149. Roberts, Brian Russell and Michelle Ann Stephens. “Archipelagic American Studies: Decontinentalizing the Study of American Culture.” Archipelagic American Studies. Eds. Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. 1–54. Roberts, Brian Russell and Michelle Ann Stephens. “Archipelagic American Studies and the Caribbean.” Journal of Transnational American Studies5. 1 (2013): 1–20. Stegner, Wallace. The Sound of Mountain Water: The Changing American West. New York: Penguin, 1997. Steward, Frank. “The Men Who Prey.” Colored American Magazine (Oct. 1903): 720–724. Wright, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2002. Wright, Richard. The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994.

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5 THE TRANSNATIONAL POETICS OF EDWARD SAID Dangerous affiliations and impossible comparisons Mina Karavanta

Introduction Worldliness…assured contamination and involvement, since in all cases the history and presence of various other groups and individuals made it impossible for anyone to be free of the conditions of material existence. Nowhere is this more true than for the American humanist today, whose proper role, I cannot stress strongly enough, is not to consolidate and affirm one tradition over all the others. It is rather to open them all, or as many as possible, to each other, to question each of them for what it has done with the others, to show how in this polyglot country in particular many traditions have interacted and–more importantly–can continue to interact in peaceful ways, ways never easy to find but nonetheless discoverable in other multicultural societies… (Said 2004) It takes imagination and courage to picture what would happen to the West if its temporal fortress were suddenly invaded by the Time of its Other. (Fabian 1983)

A Palestinian and American intellectual, advocate of the Palestinian cause and staunch supporter of an American humanism after and against the Eurocentric and ethnocentric humanism of colonial modernity, Edward Said is the author of an oeuvre that best represents the challenges and potentiality of a transnational humanist inquiry that opposes “nationalism, religious enthusiasm and the exclusivism that derives from […] identitarian thought” (Said 2004, 50). Critical of the imperial politics and orientalist discourses of the West that overshadowed its others by labelling them as the naturally depraved and inferior peoples and cognizant of the contiguity of US imperialism with this old and European metaphysics of violence, Said nevertheless called for an “American humanism” that could draw on the polyglot and multicultural fabric of US culture amplified by its heritage in the “human reality” of the “huge waves of migrants, expatriates, and refugees” (2004, 47) that constitute “the central demographic and cultural fact of the United States since its inception” (2004, 47). Seeing this heritage as an advantage at a time when European countries were still struggling in the late twentieth century to deconstruct the myths of national homogeneity 61

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and cultural purism in view of the continuous development of multicultural and diversified lifeworlds in their global cities and former imperial metropolises, Said calls for American humanism as a transnational humanist inquiry that would oppose the rhetoric and violence of nationalist and exceptionalist fantasies. His call, however controversial, exemplifies Transnational American Studies that, following Said’s work but also bearing in mind the work of other significant transnational American critics,1 can be defined as a field that challenges the adjective “American” as the effect of the dominant discourses and images that are identified with the US as a supra-power or global sheriff in and across the US borders; and instead aspires to place “America” in the world, highlighting the differences and temporalities of the cultures it is made of in relation to and reciprocity with other cultures across the world. Said’s American humanism is unavoidably controversial as it binds two terms, America and humanism, which are informed by the same cultural imperialism and exceptionalism that Said analysed critically and opposed politically. Working through the controversies of a humanistic inquiry that was accountable for rationalizing the dispossession, and the ontological and political denuding of the native, indigenous, and colonized peoples, Said also affirmed the potentiality of a world of connections that resulted from a long and indelible history of violence as well as from the affiliations that were effected by the “overlapping of cultures and intertwining of their histories”2 throughout colonial modernity. The examination of these affiliations and oppositions that highlight the contemporary phenomenon of cultural hybridity that cannot make up for the destruction of indigenous knowledges and cultures nor be reduced to the myth of national cultures as insular and monolithic entities gives Said’s work its transnational and humanistic directive. Engaging the metaphysical, historical, anthropological, and political discourses that set the West as the measure for the Orient and produced a set of oppositional and irreconcilable identities, Said is here read as a trailblazer of a transnational human poetics, one that he glosses over with what he calls “American humanism” as the signpost of a multicultural and polyglot society where “everyone is an outsider to some other identity or tradition adjacent to one’s own” and where the emergence of African-American among other hyphenated American cultural experiences and discourses best represents how the American experience is not part of one group’s last or only word but rather “shares in the same worldly context as all the others” (2004: 48). Wary of the unevenness and social and political inequities involved in this worldly context, Said does not succumb to a transnational poetics of comfort that allows for any kind of “Americanness” to function as a safety net when and where American imperialism and its hegemonic discourses subsume the transnational agenda to play the global sheriff and protect democracy in the world with all the necessary collateral damage that the wars against rogue states and terror justify. Instead, by being both Palestinian and American, thus embodying the transnational as both a diasporic subject without a state as well as a citizen of a supra-nation, he asks the difficult questions: How does one persevere as a human being in the precarious condition of statelessness? Which “frames of recognition” (Butler 2009, 5) are available to the dispossessed, whose presence is doubly denied, first in their own land and, as a consequence, within the terrain of transnational politics? What kind of a transnational polity and politics can the exilic intellectual strive to formulate while working within institutions and states for which the transnational can be the means of a “global coloniality” (Mignolo 2011, 161)? In his literary criticism and political writings on Palestine, Said consistently and perseveringly engages these questions to practice a democratic and, hence, transnational criticism that aspires to overstep the borders of the nation to dismantle the presuppositions and assumptions of its discourses of nationalism, racism, and exceptionalism, which contribute to 62

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the consolidation of the fiction of a sovereign self, community, or nation that renders its others unnecessary, obsolete, often outside history and time.3 For Said, the democratic aspect of this kind of criticism that attends to the unearthed connections between texts and the world, between culture and politics, between self and other, presupposes the transnational as the terrain that is unevenly cohabited and fraught with contradictions, where both citizens, stateless persons, subalterns, immigrants, and indigenous people participate in the making of human polities that represent what Walter Mignolo calls “a decolonial pluriversality” (Mignolo 2011, 269), which can be the ground for new democratic practices and humanistic ideals. Because Said understands the transnational as such a complex structure and experience, it is clear that his American humanism is not a naïve attempt to rewrite history or the experiences of the refugee or migrant, nor is his sense of the exilic consciousness a barren testimony of the experience of statelessness; rather, Said turns to collaborative, interdisciplinary, and transnational projects such as After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives to produce a poetics that transcends borders (whether national or disciplinary) where resilience is aesthetic, where in resistance one might capture the image of an abiding humanism. First published in 1986 and reprinted in 1999, After the Last Sky is an “exile’s book” (Said 1999, vii) that contributes to Said’s effort to affirm the presence of a stateless people as “uncertain, questionable, unstable” (Said 1979, 4). It draws on the ontological and political condition of Palestinians living either as “internal exiles in Israel, as detainees on the West Bank or Gaza without sovereignty over land” (Said 1999, 149) or as “refugees and itinerant exiles” across the world where almost 50% of the Palestinian people are dispersed. Said’s poetic and political affirmation of the Palestinian presence is punctuated by Jean Mohr’s photographs that foreground the human condition as the center of a temporality that is yet to be narrated in its own terms and is momentarily captured by his lens as a frame from a sequence that eludes both Said and his readers. The text is divided into sections that interrupt the linearity of narration by deviating from representing the essence of Palestinian life as a whole and instead portraying the shards and fragments of different and uneven Palestinian lives. Each section of the essay develops out of the various stories of exile and transience that the photographs symptomatically reveal, while punctuating the perseverance of the individual and collective, albeit, dispersed life captured by the lens. The narrative is enhanced by Said’s intertextual references to other texts by Palestinian authors and his few but evocative childhood memories from Palestine. “States,” the first part of the essay where Said excavates statelessness in its various states of being, paves the path to “Interiors,” where Said unearths the domestic, ontological, and political interiority of a life that persists while being restricted and contained in areas by checkpoints, barriers, and walls. The next section, entitled “Emergence,” excavates the consolidation of the Palestinian question as a question about the perseverance of the dispossessed against the exceptionalist nationalist policies of Israel rooted in the Zionist imperialist narrative. The narrative continues in “Past and Future” that demonstrates how dispersion and dispossession are constitutive of the political bios of the Palestinians and represent the possibility for a secular politics that is open to what seems utopian and impossible but constitutes the real political promise for a future that is not past. Instead this promise is rooted in the possibility of a politics of cohabitation that is not reduced to nationalism but respectful of the right of the Palestinians to self-determination and a secular bios irreducible to nationalism, or a “nostalgia for a lost transcendence” (Said 1999, 146). This hope is, however, framed by the postscript, “The Fall of Beirut,” and Said’s lament for the ruination of a polity that “responded to our needs as Arabs in an Arab world” (Said 1999, 174), a world the city housed in all of its brilliance as well as “vice and profligacy” (Said 1999,174), a world where the Arab human could live precisely as such, and not like a rogue. 63

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Said’s analysis is challenged by the silences and furtive glances of Mohr’s photographic subjects, whose lives resist being translated into a text that can fully document them. Displaying the liminality of these Palestinian lives that are captured in passing, or posing in their living rooms, the fields or the streets, or simply staring back at him, Mohr’s photographs become the silent interlocutor of Said’s text, “a place for wordlessness” (Marrouchi 2004, 114). Their conversation makes the text embody its transnational politics. Representing the Palestinian as the other who perseveres despite the colonial tactics of Israel and the amnesiac strategies of the international community that often sees Palestinian life as nuisance, at best, or as rogue life, at worst, the text embodies the transnational politics it aims to transform. The product of a transnational collaboration between a Palestinian intellectual and a photographer of Jewish origins, the text interrupts the international community of readers it addresses with the “time of the other” (Fabian 1983, 35) in order to challenge the politics that have predetermined her omission and extinction, what Elizabeth Povinelli calls “the governance of the prior” (Povinelli 2011, 36). The affirmation of the presence of the Palestinians, while highlighting the ongoing history of colonization and dispossession that threatens their political existence, conjures the long history of dispossession of the indigenous and the subaltern people across the world that are put under erasure as the ones left outside the time of progress and invokes the ongoing history of migration, exile, and banishment that repeatedly confronts the US and Europe. The history of walls, fences, and camps is after all a transnational history with specific registers in the US and European histories that record the long catastrophe of the human, which Said conjures through the allusions he makes to the other histories with which the Palestinian shares ties such as the American Indians, the African Americans, the Cypriots, and others (Said 1999, 159). These transnational connections challenge the American component implicated in these histories of dispossession: the transnational approach for Said becomes a filter through which the nation and in this case the American nation are to be critiqued and challenged. The photographs are not an accompaniment to the essay but rather a counterpoint to it. Using Said’s musical term, the counterpoint, is apropos of the antinomy in the text between the photograph (as both an archive and an act of witnessing) and the essay that translates the non-discursive properties of the photograph into written discourse. The written text thus opens the photograph both to the alterity it records and to an internal self-differentiation that both word and image capture in a specific place and time that cannot be repeated nor forgotten and remains forever present. While the photographs often foreground a human subject in pain that can educate its viewers on compassion and thus relieve them of the responsibility to act, in this text, the photograph is not an anaesthetic to the pain of others4 but rather the aesthetic source of a levity,5 an everyday life thick with its cultural materiality and practices. Said’s essay translates the life captured by Mohr’s photographs into a human poetics to punctuate the obdurate presence of the subjects of the photographs against the discourses of the State of Israel and its corroborating western allies, including of course the US, that try to force the Palestinians into a political and ontological disappearance. The text sets images against the kind of transnational politics that a transnational poetics reframes by way of giving presence to the resilience of communities across borders. The photograph captures the temporary, precarious and lived present of its subject while interrupting, albeit momentarily like a flash, the temporality of the reader who reads in safety. The two times contradict each other: time lived in precarity and conditionality as opposed to time lived in the certainty and comfort that the act of reading about the predicament of others always requires. The reader asked to contemplate this condition of statelessness and exile in one’s homeland has the luxury of an undeniable right to a secure present readily available to him or 64

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her and certain to always arrive. The contradiction between these two different kinds of present that the text affiliates is effected by the aesthetic quality of Mohr’s photographs, each of which becomes for Said what Jacques Derrida calls a “scene of deciphering” (Richter 2010, xxi). Said and Mohr’s non-dialectizable conversation thus puts deconstruction into practice by setting the interiority of Palestinian lives as a frame that resists its reduction to a cumulative narrative. Word and image share a contrapuntal relation that affirms the interior of social and political life, of survival and perseverance, and remains open without closure as a testimony that is already inherited and sustained in the future that is already present, even if the now, the present time framed by the photographs, is circumscribed by the aesthetic frame of the photograph and, by extension, by the walls and borders that the State of Israel has imposed on the Palestinians and their lands under a long state of emergency. What Said achieves is not a mere repetition that further explicates the photographs but a re-invention of this life from its fragments and ruins; reconstellated in Said’s text, the representation of this life interacts with other texts that encode Palestinian life in a variety of aesthetics and discourses, from Palestinian poetry and novels, to essays and archaeological narratives, that, few as they may be when compared to the multiple registers of the national narratives of Israel, grant Palestinian life a literary presence. This act of translation that expounds on the details of the facts that each photograph records by bearing witness to the singularity of its subject matter (Richter 2010, xxv) impels deconstruction as the analysis that defers and delays the fact not to refute it by succumbing to relativism and political irresponsibility which, for Said, are one and the same, but rather to reconstellate6 it in contexts that in their historical concreteness and specificity “gather strands of contemporary allusion into a new and often unexpected structure of feeling” (Said 1999, 157). This is crucial for Said who struggles against the disappearance of Palestinian life from all kinds of secular discourses that can punctuate how “we too [that is Palestinians] are subject to time, development, change, and decline, a fact that must dispel any notion that Palestinians are a sort of essentialized paradigm of permanent homelessness and terror” (Said 1999, 162). To fight off the symptoms of this paradigm, he restores the ecology of Palestinian existence (Said 1999, 18) back to the concreteness of its livity writing it “min-al-dakhil” [from the interior] (Said 1999, 51). Does the stateless life as life in internal and external exile have an interiority that cannot be walled off, controlled, policed, fragmented as it is by the ongoing colonialism? What are its own sociogenic codes that enable it to be autopoetically instituted in a condition of permanent exile?7 This is an exile that is not the privileged condition of the intellectual in exile that Said appropriates as a constitutive part of his work that is the antidote to the impossibility of a return to a native land but exile as summed up by the inglorious existence of a native Arab inhabitant of Palestine-Israel. In Said’s words, this existence is “linked negatively to encomiums about Israel’s democracy, achievements, excitement” and has “slipped into the place occupied by Nazis and anti-Semites,” a discursive event that has reduced Palestinian lives to the place of the rogue “known for no actual achievement, no characteristic worthy of esteem, except the effrontery of disrupting Middle East peace” (Said 1999, 17). Acknowledged or rather tolerated as a people “with no rights” or as “resident aliens,” they are “‘other’ and opposite, a flaw in the geometry of resettlement and exodus” (Said 1999, 17); with no “Einsteins, no Chagall, no Freud or Rubinstein” and “no Holocaust to protect us with the world’s compassion” (Said 1999, 17), as Said stresses, they are less than human. Yet, there/here they are: obdurate in their presence, persevering in their existence. Embroidering a poetic analysis out of Mohr’s photographs, Said explores the interiority of that life with “rich, cool interiors which outsiders cannot penetrate” (Said 1999, 49); in their domestic spaces, other makeshift and transient, other more permanent and bourgeois, they 65

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are portrayed in a regular everydayness that gives the impression of a continuity of existence. This everyday life extends from the interior of houses to camps, to the farms of refugee labor, to the tourist market in Jerusalem, to life in the streets where the mundane scene of a street vendor can suddenly give its place to an incident (Said 1999, 16)—a young boy throwing a stone at a passing military jeep—that becomes an event that reveals how tension can instantly build into the idleness of the everyday. The subjects of these photographs are turned into minor histories that crack the grand narrative of Zionism and “the historiographical presumption of progressive history that supports the idea of Zionism as the unfolding realization of an ideal” (Butler 2009, 99). This progressive history that omits the other is characteristic of the different histories of colonial and imperial expansion; it is not surprising therefore that Said should compare the Zionist narrative of settler colonialism in Palestine to American puritanism both in After the Last Sky and in the Question of Palestine. The prophecy-fulfillment narrative of the Puritans arising from the Old Testament provides the blueprint for the colonial vision of Zionism that saw the natives as an impediment to its plan of translating the empty land, the terra nullius, into what in 1630 John Winthrop called a “city upon a hill” aboard the famous Arbella;8 the Puritan ideology heavily relied on the hypothesis the Zionists would repeat with the same, if not narrower, vision that would not permit the advantage of historical hindsight that three centuries later should have afforded them the knowledge of the expropriation and destruction of Native American people and their culture, the history of slavery, and the long durée of racism. They rather chose to repeat the colonial policies of the Puritans with the “exact same narrowness of vision” (Said 1999, 106); the success of their settler colonialism “depended on the ability to master the land, transforming the virgin territories into something else— a farm, a village, a road, a canal, a railway, a mine, a factory, a city, and finally, an urban nation” (Kolodny 1984, 4), thus secularizing the “providentially ordained narrative, so fundamental to the discourse of the American Puritans” (Spanos 2012, 108) and translating it into American exceptionalism. This affiliation between Zionism, American exceptionalism, and the European context of imperialism spreading to incorporate the international, that is, non-western, world enables Said to read these specific photographs transnationally and their cultural and political domain as part of a larger narrative in which the Palestinian question is interpolated in the histories of the Armenians, the Jews, the Irish, the Cypriots, the American blacks, the Poles, the American Indians, at those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance of peoples fade into each other, where resistance is a necessity, but where there is also sometimes a growing realization of the need for an unusual and, to some degree, an unprecedented knowledge. (Said 1999, 159) In “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims,” Ella Shohat further contributes to the list of the intertwined histories of expropriation and their overlapping territories and thus the challenge of unprecedented knowledge by excavating the genealogy of the Oriental Jew, the Sephardim or the Third World Jewish people forced into the Zionist narrative as the national pariahs that would be the negative, albeit integrated, other of the Ashkenazi, that is, European and thus superior Jews of the State of Israel. Rewriting the history of these African and Asian Jews as the history of the “Jewish cavedwellers” (Shohat 1997, 44), the State of Israel developed processes of integration through subjection in its interior, thus repressing the history of the constituency that symbolically 66

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threatened the nationalist myth of a homogeneous nation of expropriated Jews from around the world. Their affinity ties with the Palestinians and other Arabs in Israel, the possibility of a shared space created from an affiliation between their histories of expropriation, their pariah status, despite the obvious unevenness between the Sephardim and the Palestinians, reveal the imperialist ideology and practices that, for Shohat, relate to the “strong aversion to respecting the right of self-determination of non-European peoples” that the “present regime in Israel inherited from Europe” (Shohat 1997, 66). Adding this history to Said’s long list of expropriated constituencies and their communities, Shohat argues that the linking of the histories of oppression within the national agendas as well as across them conjures the specters of imperialism and nationalism; these specters embody the possibility that the victims they represent will alert the oppressed to perceive the “linked analogies between their oppressions” (Shohat 1997, 65). This linking, immanent in narratives that engender such unprecedented knowledge through impossible comparisons, dares to challenge the punctuation of certain histories of human disaster over others and instead read them contrapuntally and transnationally, against the nationalist narratives that project the myth of the singular, pure identity. An example of such a reading is Said’s Freud and the Non-European, where Said demonstrates how Freud in Moses and Monotheism examines the founder of Jewish identity as a nonEuropean Egyptian and, thus, as the example of the “inherent limits that prevent it from being fully incorporated into one, and only one, Identity” (Said 2003, 54). For Said, Freud’s “writing travels across temporal, cultural, and ideological boundaries in unforeseen ways” (Said 2003, 24); Said’s reading of Freud in late style helps him attend to a politics of identity that “cannot be thought or worked through itself alone […] but through that originary break or flaw which will not be repressed” (Said 2003, 54). This reading discloses two important facts about Said’s anti-Zionism: it is a strategic anti-essentialism against all identity politics and an effort to contemplate the possibility of a radically alternative politics beyond nationalism. As William V. Spanos argues, although Said “recognized the necessity of nationalism in the struggle of colonized peoples for self-determination and liberation, he saw this as a strategic and not essentialist need” (Spanos 2012, 137). For Said, Moses, a figure of the “Arab Jew” is a figure “within which ‘Arab’ and ‘Jew’ cannot be dissociated” (Butler 2012, 30) that summons the need to envision a politics beyond the identity politics of antagonism in a binational state about which, in Parting Ways, Butler wonders whether it can proceed “beyond both the nation and the binary of Jew/Palestinian that is belied by both the Arab Jew and the Palestinian Israeli” (Butler 2012, 31). The radically alternative politics is not to see the other in oneself or even the self as other but to be able to read identity contrapuntally, as an “open secular element” (Said 1999, 150) that refuses to abide by the “symmetry of redemption” (Said 1999, 150), which navigates the fulfilment of the Zionist project so far off from the original figure of Moses who represents the “diasporic, wandering, unresolved, cosmopolitan consciousness of someone who is both inside and outside his or her community” (Said 2003, 53). This history of dispossession and expropriation is a shared history, which underlies the history of the nation-state, be it the US, Israel, or other, marked by the history of walls, fences, camps, and the stateless people that this history has produced often with a progressive vengeance. In this light, Said prods at the narrative of the Holocaust as an incomparable experience, unique in its dimensions of human catastrophe, and compares it to the continuous political and ontological expropriation of the Palestinians as one of the stateless people in late modernity. The risky affiliation that Said attempts here can be the source of a radically alternative politics that is able to ask the question of why the history of the disaster of one people can be exploited for the persistent catastrophe of another. It also asks the 67

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question “whether such histories might not produce the possibility of a new politics for those lands in which the rights of the refugee would be paramount, in which no one would be excluded from citizenship in an effort to minimise heterogeneity” (Butler 2012, 110). Such risky affiliations force their readers and spectators into asking how national narratives that prevail in current transnational analyses that propound the need to overcome the nationalist agendas continue to propagate the ideologies of imperialism. In the current debates on transnational imaginaries that arise beyond the structures of national myths, how do the people without a state (their numbers growing as evinced in the tide of refugees) or the subaltern and minority cultures that live in partitioned states appear as an example of a humanity that can be the source of other sociogenic codes and other communities? Communities like the one Said imagines in After the Last Sky, when the persistent presence of these Palestinian lives from the past and in the present attest to the need to think about the possibility of a bi-national state “in which Israel and Palestine are parts, rather than antagonists of each other’s history and underlying reality” (Said 2003, 55). In this narrative, the water-seller (Said 1999, 141) features not as the relic of the primitive or the exotic subject of the picturesque Orient but as the living testimony of an ongoing life interrupted by the State of Israel that has yet failed to erase him; he thus stands for the life of a human, who, secondclass citizen as he may be, “plies the streets, hawks his wares, and goes on as he was” (Said 1999, 141). This figure also challenges another narrative that States and not just the State of Israel are linked with: the master narrative of a humanity in which the human beings with access to rights and their frames of representation tend to forget the growing numbers of human beings without rights such as the stateless peoples, the refugees and the immigrants without documents, who remain outside the definition that equates human with Man, and who still have to fight for the fundamental right of all rights, what Hannah Arendt calls “the right to have rights” (Arendt 1951, 176). After the Last Sky moves into the interior of the precarity and yet “prevailing attitude” (Said 1999, 100) of the Palestinians who find the ways of “turning presence into small-scale obduracy” and “producing themselves” (Said 1999, 108) through work that contributes to the maintenance of their public and private spaces and the creation of persevering attachments to things and practices, however small or insignificant they might be at least to the onlookers and colonizers. It exemplifies Said’s practice of a transnational American analysis whose center is the decentering of a consolidated vision of the world while attending to the lived temporalities of all peoples in the world whether with or without a state and whose aim is not to forget the past but critically engage it by fighting against nationalism, religious fanaticism and racism so that the present remains open to the ones who are here or arriving to inherit it.

Notes 1 See for instance Pease (2009) and Kaplan (2002). 2 This is the title of Chapter One in Culture and Imperialism; Said views modern cultures not as insular entities but as reciprocally, albeit unevenly, constituted within colonial modernity. 3 Johannes Fabian calls this phenomenon of distancing the other in order to incorporate him or her into the “time of the observer” (1983, 25) the “denial of coevalness” (1983, 31). 4 I refer to Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (2004) and her earlier work On Photography (1977). 5 See Roberts (2014) and Meeks (2002). 6 Drawing from Theodor W. Adorno’s analysis of Walter Benjamin’s theorisation of constellation, Nina Morgan and I have defined reconstellation as the process that “both engages previously untried affiliations and relations and unavoidably returns to the previously set contexts from which concepts and

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The transnational poetics of Edward Said objects are wrenched” (Karavanta and Morgan 2008, 19). Reconstellation thus foregrounds their allusive and contrapuntal ties (ibid.). 7 I draw on Sylvia Wynter’s unpublished essay “On Being Human as Praxis” and her rigorous critique of humanism. See also Wynter’s “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience.” 8 See Sacvan Bercovitch’s analysis of Winthrop’s famous sermon aboard the Arbella in the “Ends of Puritan Rhetoric” in The Rites of Assent. See also Susan Howe’s reading of the rhetorical violence of Winthrop’s discourse in The Birth-mark, which aptly demonstrates Bercovitch’s argument that “history and rhetoric” are the “two kinds of violence” upon which relies the discovery of America, “the modern instance par excellence of how metaphor becomes fact, and fact, metaphor” (Bercovitch 1992, 71).

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. Imperialism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1951. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America. New York: Routledge, 1992. Butler, Judith. Frames of War. London: Verso, 2009. Butler, Judith. Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Derrida, Jacques. Copy, Archive, Signature. Trans. Jeff Fort. Ed. Gerhard Richter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Howe, Susan. The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002. Karavanta, Mina and Nina Morgan. “Introduction: Humanism, Hybridity and Democratic Praxis.” Edward Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid. Eds. Mina Karavanta and Nina Morgan. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. 1–21. Kolodny, Annette. The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Marrouchi, Mustapha. Edward Said at the Limits. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. McClintock, Anne, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat, eds. Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997. Meeks, Brian. “Reasoning with Caliban’s Reason.” Small Axe 6.1 (2002): 158–168. Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Pease, Donald. The New American Exceptionalism: The Futures of American Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Povinelli, Elizabeth. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Richter, Gerhard. “Between Translation and Invention: The Photograph in Deconstruction.” In Jacques Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature. Trans. Jeff Fort. Ed. Gerhard Richter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. ix–xxxviii. Roberts, Neil. “Violence, Livity, Freedom.” Small Axe 18.1 (2014): 181–192. Said, Edward. The Question of Palestine. New York: Times Books, 1979. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994. Said, Edward. Covering Islam. New York: Vintage, 1997[1991]. Said, Edward. “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims.” Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives. Eds. McClintock, Anne, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997. 15–38. Said, Edward. After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Said, Edward. Freud and the Non-European. London: Verso, 2003. Said, Edward. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Shohat, Ella. “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims.” Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives. Eds. McClintock, Anne, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997. 39–68.

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Mina Karavanta Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin, 2004. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London: Penguin, 1977. Spanos, William V. America’s Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Spanos, William V. Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt & Edward Said in Counterpoint. Columbus: Ohio State University, 2012. Wiegman, Robyn, and Donald Pease, eds. The Futures of American Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. Wynter, Sylvia. “Human Being as Noun? Or Human Being as Praxis? Towards the Autopoetic Turn/ Overturn: A Manifesto.” Unpublished essay. Wynter, Sylvia. “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience.” National Identities and Socio-political changes in Latin America. Eds. Duran-Cogan, Mercedes F. and Antonio Gomez-Moriana. New York: Routledge, 2001. 30–66.

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6 THE PACIFIC TURN Transnational Asian American Studies William Nessly

Boundaries, history, and debates The United States has a long history of intervention in the geographical section of the globe that stretches west from the western shores of the United States, including the Pacific Ocean and its many islands, reaching north to the Bering Strait and the islands of Alaska, across the ocean to the coasts of Asia, and most of Oceania. This stretch of the globe, encompassing diverse lands, waters, and peoples, is often referred to as a region: the Pacific, the Asia/Pacific, or the Pacific Rim. The region always includes East Asia, Southeast Asia, and many islands of the Pacific, and it sometimes includes Australia, New Zealand, Russia, the US, Mexico, Canada, and the western coastal nations of South and Central America. As a geographical construct imagined to interact with the United States, however, the “Pacific” has been Asian and Pacific Islander rather than Latino/a or white, anchored in East and Southeast Asia and supplemented, unevenly and inconsistently, by many of the Pacific islands. The more recent adoption of the term “transpacific” to describe this region offers the latest iteration in a series of terms that have been used in the modern era.1 The debates over the origins, accuracy, and politics of the terms used to describe this region have been carefully and thoroughly analysed in several important scholarly volumes.2 Arif Dirlik raises many of the key concerns in his important introduction to What is in a Rim?: Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea (Dirilik 1998b). As Dirlik explains, “The Pacific Rim (or Pacific Basin, Asia-Pacific) is an invented concept” (Dirilik 1998b, 3), whose “material basis is defined best not by physical geography, but by relationships (economic, social, political, milita[ry] and cultural) that are concretely historical” (Dirilik 1998b, 4). According to Dirlik, “the idea of the Pacific, therefore, is not so much a well-defined idea as it is a discourse that seeks to construct what is pretended to be its point of departure” (Dirilik 1998b, 4). The contradictions, omissions, and motivations behind the various iterations of the “Pacific region idea” speak to the political work that these terms are doing. Dirlik articulates seven or more fundamental contradictions entailed by these terms, and the many important scholarly volumes that follow What is in a Rim? continue to highlight the shifting meanings of those terms and their important ideological implications. Historically, US intervention in the Pacific stretches back at least to Commodore Perry’s “opening” of Japan in 1853. The US also participated in the exploitation of China by 71

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European and other imperial powers well into the twentieth century. The US takeover of the Philippines following the Spanish American war in 1899 resulted in the United States officially possessing a formal colony. Throughout the twentieth century, however, the US has also maintained full administrative control over various Pacific islands, including Hawai‘i, which ultimately became a state in 1959. The Pacific was the site of intensive US military conflict with Japan during World War II, and then wars in Korea and in Vietnam and surrounding nations during the Cold War. The development of vibrant economies in Japan and the so-called Asian Tigers (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong) caused economic tensions between Asian countries and the US, and the rise of China has led to a shift in regional power in East Asia and shifts in US policy in the region. In the past ten years, US politicians have signaled their desire to pivot toward Asia, although more recent political developments in the US, including the election of President Donald Trump, leave an uncertain future of US engagement in the Pacific. Within this shifting geopolitical context, the academic study of US engagement with the Pacific has also shifted. Several overlapping fields of US academic study, including Asian Studies, Asian American Studies, and Transnational American Studies have variously addressed this history of engagement. This chapter traces the transnational turn of Asian American Studies from the field’s earlier ethnic nationalist roots, the field’s place in the larger transnational turn of American Studies, its re-engagement with Asian Studies, and the new directions that are now emerging as a result of this (re)turn to the Pacific. As Mark Chiang has detailed, Asian American Studies originated in the late 1960s; from its start, however, the field has interrogated the parameters of its object of study: Asian Americans. Scholars such as Yen Le Espiritu, Elaine Kim, David Palumbo-Liu, and many others have debated the complex status of the pan-ethnic formation Asian American and its assumptions, contradictions, and omissions. As the “Asian” in Asian American attests, the field was always already transnational, reaching beyond the Americas out to Asia in many respects. At its start, as cultural nationalist texts such as the pioneering anthology Aiiieeeee! demonstrate (Chin et al. 1974), Asian American Studies scholars focused primarily on the experiences of Asian Americans within a US national frame, with a particular emphasis on the immigrant narrative and Asian Americans’ struggles for political and cultural acceptance in the face of institutionalized racism. Within this framework of national belonging and racial identity, Asian American Studies commonly positioned itself as distinct from Asian Studies, deemphasizing the study of Asia. As Kandice Chuh puts it, “Institutionally and politically long-compelled to assert the Americanness of Asian American literatures, [the study of Asian Americans] has in many instances come to all but deny any connection—historic, geographic, linguistic—to ‘Asia,’ in effect reproducing a seemingly immutable split between Asia and America” (Chuh 2001, 278). This split also reinforced the disciplinary divide between Asian Studies and Asian American Studies, a divide that scholars such as Sucheta Mazumdar and Rachel C. Lee sought to bridge, in ways that retained and enhanced Asian American Studies’ concerns with social justice.3 In 1993, Elaine Kim argued, however, that conditions were changing: The lines between Asian and Asian American, so crucial to identity formations in the past, are increasingly blurred: transportation to and communication with Asia is no longer daunting, resulting in new crossovers and intersections and different kinds of material and cultural distances today. (Kim 1993, xi) 72

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The transnational turn, the immigrant, and US imperialism Most scholars, however, saw the transnational turn in American Studies and Asian American Studies as a salutary call for a more thoroughgoing political engagement with US domestic and imperial power. In 1993, Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease published their edited volume Cultures of United States Imperialism, a foundational text in the transnational turn in American Studies. Within Asian American Studies, the foundational text of the transnational turn is arguably Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts (Lowe 1996). Lowe focuses not simply on the Asian American within an American context, but on the figure of the immigrant from Asia, broadening her perspective to include US intervention in Asia, and to highlight the process by which the Asian immigrant becomes assimilated (or not assimilated) into the nation. Lowe emphasizes “the ways in which Asian Americans … are not exclusively formed as racialized minorities within the United States but are simultaneously determined by colonialism and capital investment in Asia” (Lowe 1996, 8). Her focus is transnational, and she proposes “a new political subject allegorized by the ‘immigrant’”—a subject “articulated simultaneously within both U.S. national and global frameworks” (Lowe 1996, 34). Lowe argues that the Asian immigrant fulfills a special role in the American national imaginary. According to Lowe, “[i]n the last century and a half, the American citizen has been defined over and against the Asian immigrant” (Lowe 1996, 4). Unlike “the American soldier, who … is the quintessential citizen and therefore the ideal representative of the nation, … the American of Asian descent remains the symbolic ‘alien,’ the metonym for Asia who by definition cannot be imagined as sharing in America” (Lowe 1996, 6). The assimilation of the Asian into America is constantly “defer[red] and displace[d]” (Lowe 1996, 6); the immigrant is “produced by the law as margin and threat to [the] symbolic whole” of the nation (Lowe 1996, 8). For Lowe, the figure of the Asian is the other within or the other just outside against which America is defined and consolidated. Crucially, Lowe locates the Asian American at the center of the political and cultural contradictions of the nation. The Asian immigrant becomes a figure of resistance (Lowe 1996, 9), and Asian American cultural production similarly resists the dominant paradigms of a majority culture since it is “materially and aesthetically at odds with the resolution of the citizen to the nation” (Lowe 1996, 30). Asian Americanist scholars have responded to Lowe’s redefinition of the field in varied ways. Some scholars, such as Mae Ngai, retain the vector of immigration but similarly move beyond idealized narratives of assimilation and integration. Ngai’s Impossible Subjects (Ngai 2004) explores the complex and ideologically fraught history of Asian immigration to the United States, telling an important story of the formative influence of US institutionalized racism and its connections to US imperialism in Asia. In America’s Asia (Lye 2004), Colleen Lye brings together the specter of yellow peril and the image of the model minority, where the threatening immigrant/invader and the ideally assimilated racial group are linked through their common trait of prodigious economic productivity. Other scholars such as Aihwa Ong have emphasized the liberatory potential of transnational mobility, viewing the movements of certain transnationally mobile Asian American subjects—“flexible citizens”—as disruptive of established patterns of oppression by US culture and the US state.4 The editors of Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits argue that the increasingly global movements of Asian Americans—the “diasporic, mobile, transmigratory nature of Asian American experience”—require new conceptions of subjectivity in Asian American Studies (Lim et al. 2006, 1). A transnational context is needed to account for new locations and “different Asian American ethnic groups—South Asian, Korean American, Vietnamese, and South-East Asian American, for example” to expand a field that has been “dominated by East Asian American writing” (Lim et al. 2006, 14). In their articulation of a 73

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more transnational Asian American Studies, Shirley Geok-lin Lim and her co-editors in this volume (preceded in 1999, by Lim et al., Transnational Asia Pacific: Gender, Culture, and the Public Sphere) follow the logic of the migration of Asian American bodies, tracing the history of their geographical location through time. The editors thus tie our understanding of the salient contexts of literary analysis to the history of the bodily presence of the author in certain spaces. This transnational expansion of the field is thus defined by its continued focus on a migratory model of literary analysis, where literature is grounded in and expressive of a contextual history that is tied to the formation of the author’s identity. Many other Asian Americanists have followed and expanded on Lowe in articulating transnational Asian American studies as most urgently focused on the critique of US imperialism in Asia. In her 2014 introduction to The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature, Rachel C. Lee highlights Asian Americanist “scholarship’s turn away from interpreting Asian American literature through a liberal, rights-based notion of national belonging” (Lee 2004, 4). As Lee explains, the last eight years have seen Asian Americanist literary study emphasizing the centrality of American empire and militarism as driving forces for literary and aesthetic productions… In these articulations, Asian Americanists have certainly been influenced by postcolonial theory’s investigations of the afterlives of territorial imperialism. (Lim et al. 2006, 3) Scholars such as Victor Bascara and Jodi Kim point out that the US has been a formal colonial power (in the Philippines) and still controls a network of territories in Pacific islands from Guam to Okinawa.5 Their scholarly work also critiques US exceptionalism and, as Yuan Shu and Donald Pease have put it, “the US-centered global order that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have euphemistically referred to as ‘Empire’” (Hardt and Negri 2015b, 20). In Ends of Empire, Jodi Kim (2010) examines US imperialism and Asian American Studies “at the intersection of American studies, ethnic studies, critical race studies, and postcolonial studies” (Kim 2010, 9). Kim focuses specifically on the Cold War and redefines the Cold War as a period centered around a US “imperial formation” marked by “more informal or neoimperial forms of political, economic, military, and cultural domination that stop short of territorial annexation” (Kim 2010, 18). Asian Americanists thus offer powerful critiques that foreground US imperialism, thematize Asian American resistance to or complicity with the projection of US power, and parallel the work of Americanist scholars who have highlighted US imperialism in other contexts. As their work demonstrates, the transnational turn has helped to broaden the field’s narrower traditional focus on discrimination within the US to foreground the profound impact of US interventions in Asia. Yet even as they have expanded their focus beyond the US borders, Asian Americanists have often kept their focus on US actions and on the consequences for US-based Asians and Asian Americans.6 And now that the critique of US imperialism abroad has come to dominate the field as the primary way to read transnational Asian American works, this approach risks overemphasizing US influence and even constructing US imperial power as inevitable. In effect, the practice of making visible US imperialism and domination in East Asia can itself become recursively US-centric.

US-centric approaches and Japanese imperialism As scholars now work to reframe transnational Asian American studies, Jodi Kim’s inclusion of Japan in her critique of US empire points to Japanese imperialism as an important object of study (Kim 2010, 25). Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho write: 74

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The regions now called Asia and the Pacific Islands share a history of colonial rule by Japan and the United States. Imperialist wars initiated by these respective nationstates created wartime and postwar conditions of military invasion, occupation, and violence through which the peoples of these regions have struggled and survived. The parallels and interconnections between U.S. and Japanese imperialisms together constitute an important site of analysis to comprehend the current state of geopolitics, militarized movements, and migrations since the twentieth century. The clashing of the Japanese and U.S. empires variously devastated and made claims to liberate colonized subjects from the other competing imperialist power(s). (Shigematsu and Camacho 2010, xvi) Asian Americanist scholars have responded to the renewed visibility of Japanese imperialism by producing important work on Japan’s historical imperial aggression and wars of conquest; its war crimes, including the exploitation of “comfort women”; the impact of its tourism; and its economic domination of the transpacific region. This scholarship has helped to complicate a straightforward paradigm of US domination of Asia within Asian American Studies, more closely aligning Asian Americanists with Asian Studies scholars, who have been examining Japanese imperialism for some time. One of the central figures for this reframing in Asian American studies is Kandice Chuh. In an article on “hemispheric studies” and the work of Karen Tei Yamashita, Chuh articulates “the need to look within and among but also beyond the Americas and specifically to Asia in critical efforts to challenge the discursive centrality of the US” (Chuh 2006, 619). Chuh challenges Asian Americanists to imagine a transnational Asian American Studies that is not always and automatically US-centric. Her concern is that one might merely replace a narrowed focus inside the territorial boundaries of the US nation-state with a slightly expanded focus that includes the extraterritorial activities of the same nation-state and little more. In Imagine Otherwise Chuh argues, “Effectively, Asian Americanist practices … reproduced the territorial logic of U.S. nationalism” (Chuh 2003, 87) and “the practice of holding ‘Asia’ at a cognitive distance sustains a certain kind of imperialist epistemology responsible for conceiving Asian-raced peoples, among others, as Others” (Chuh 2003, 88). In one chapter of her book, Chuh analyses two Korean American texts, Ronyoung Kim’s (1987) Clay Walls and Chang-rae Lee’s (1999) A Gesture Life, each of which “thematizes Japanese colonialism” (Chuh 2010, 100). As Chuh explains, “[t]hese novels point to Korean nationalism, Japanese colonialism, and U.S. racism as distinguishable but inseparably linked historical narratives that simultaneously underwrite the production of Korean and Korean American subjectivities,” foregrounding the limitations of interpretive frameworks that view “‘Asians in America’ and ‘Asians in Asia’ … as separate and distinct” (Chuh 2010, 88). In this way, Chuh examines “the ways that practices of Japanese imperialism participate in producing ‘Korean America’ as a formation that is both national and transnational” (Chuh 2010, 15). For Chuh, “efforts to understand the functionalization of Asian American social subjectivities are hindered … by ignorance of Japanese and Korean histories” (Chuh 2001, 279). Chuh emphasizes “the critical importance of thinking through global historical specificities as instrumental to understanding the particularities and ideologies constituting local Asian Americanist sites of intervention” (Chuh 2001, 279). As Chuh’s analysis shows, a fully realized, transnationally focused interpretive practice must account for specific histories that exceed the geographical boundaries of the United States. These histories are not limited merely to the reach of US power into Asia and the Pacific. 75

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They also crucially entail the histories of interaction between and among Asian-Pacific entities beyond the US, such as the history of Japan’s colonization of Korea. These often neglected histories are “distinguishable [from] but inseparably linked” (Chuh 2003, 88) to US-specific narratives and contribute meaningfully to Asian American identity formation and cultural production.

The polycentric transpacific The transnational turn within Asian American Studies has led to a geographical expansion of the field. Journals such as the open-access Journal of Transnational American Studies (based at Stanford University) and Verge: Studies in Global Asia (published by Minnesota Press), have worked to bridge divides among a global community of scholars to explore transnational connections across the Pacific. The rise of the transpacific has also arguably made the racial formation “Asian American” more inclusive, incorporating Pacific Islanders into a broader category of Asian Pacific Islander Americans, for example. As it has highlighted Asian contexts and intra-Asian dynamics, however, the transnational turn has also shown how the field has foregrounded and prioritized certain cultures and ethnicities while marginalizing and subordinating others. In many respects, Asian American Studies and the Asian American community have struggled from the start with what Rachel C. Lee calls in another context a “stratification” that prioritizes and positions “some ethnonational groups (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese) over others (Kanaka Maoli, Samoan, Chamorro, Cambodian, Hmong, Bangladeshi, Nepalese, Okinawan, Lebanese, and Jordanian, for example)” (Lee 2014a, 9; emphasis added). This stratification and the tensions that arise from intra-Asian differentiation, conflict, and histories of exploitation and domination are not erased through a turn to the transpacific or transnationalism more generally. In fact, as the term transpacific becomes increasingly paradigmatic within Asian American Studies, its specific geographical orientation toward East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific also influences broader perceptions of what counts as Asian American. In this way, the term arguably risks contributing to the occlusion of several groups that are already at the margins of the racial formation Asian American, such as South Asians and Arab Americans of Western Asian descent.7 Likewise, even as the Pacific has taken on increased visibility, the field has often treated Pacific Islanders as secondary or supplementary. As Erin Suzuki puts it, Pacific Island studies critics Amy Ku’leialoha Stillman, Vicente Diaz, and J. Kéhaulani Kauanui among others have pointed out how the transnational turn of Asian American studies has had a … tendency to exclude, elide, or appropriate Pacific Island histories and perspectives in contemporary formulations of the transpacific. (Suzuki 2014, 356–357)8 In many respects, the occlusion of Pacific Island perspectives in favor of East Asian and other Asian perspectives within academic discourse neatly parallels the geopolitical history of multiple, overlapping colonizations in the Pacific, in which Asian nations as well as the US and Europe have subjugated and dominated Pacific islands. The important work by Candace Fujikane and others on settler colonialism in Hawai‘i provides a model for attending to both the legacy of colonialism in the Pacific and the extent to which that legacy has been overlooked. Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, the editors of Asian Settler Colonialism (Fujikane 2008), follow pioneering critic Haunani-Kay Trask in 76

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“identif[ying] Asians in Hawai‘i as settlers who benefit from the colonial subjugation of Hawaiians” (Fujikane 2008, 4). Fujikane argues, for example, that ethnic histories written about Asians in Hawai‘i … do not address the roles of Asians in an American colonial system. Instead they recount Asian histories of oppression and resistance in Hawai‘i, erecting a multicultural ethnic studies framework that ends up reproducing the colonial claims made in white settler historiography. (Fujikane 2008, 2) The traditional concerns of ethnic minority rights discourse—Asian Americanists’ “focus on racism, discrimination, and the exclusion of Asians from full participation in an American democracy” (Fujikane 2008, 2)—effectively subsume or supplant Native Hawaiian histories of oppression and resistance. Fujikane hits on two key recent developments within transnational Asian American Studies: the idea and importance of decentering the US and the recognition that multiple vectors of power crisscross the transpacific. Fujikane argues that “an analysis of settler colonialism positions indigenous peoples at the center, foregrounding not settler groups’ relationships with each other or with the U.S. settler state, but with the indigenous peoples whose ancestral lands settlers occupy” (Fujikane 2008, 9). Fujikane also points out that there are significantly different power relations among Asian settler groups… [T]he intrasettler racism and discrimination they are subjected to illuminate the complex relations of power among settler groups. Some Asian groups, like Filipinos, remain politically and economically subordinated in Hawai‘i, and anti-Filipino racism in Hawai‘i is a legacy of Spanish, American, and Japanese colonial violence and occupation of the Philippines. (Fujikane 2008, 9) Fujikane’s example of the multiple layers of colonization and uneven privilege experienced by Filipinos in Hawai‘i speaks precisely to the need to rethink limited binary understandings of power in the Asia/Pacific. In his foreword to The Transnational Politics of Asian Americans, Don Nakanishi highlights “the impact of international political conflicts and domestic political crises involving Asian homelands on interethnic and intra-community political relations involving Asian American communities” (Nakanishi 2009, xii). These “intra-community political relations,” as Nakanishi calls them, are impacted not just by contemporary events but also by the complex history of past interactions between and among Asian countries of origin. According to Nakanishi, “international politics are pertinent to Asian Americans in relation to a wide spectrum of bilateral and multilateral relations between the United States and Asia (or specific countries of the region that are homelands for Asian Americans)” (Nakanishi 2009, xii; emphasis added). Nakanishi’s emphasis on multilateral as well as bilateral relations moves beyond binary US-Asian relations to account for the importance of intra-Asian relations. In her book Planetary Modernisms, Susan Stanford Friedman uses the term “polycentric” to discuss a similarly complex spectrum of relations on a global scale. Friedman writes, “Polycentric and multinodal suggest power linkages differently. The globe, these adjectives suggest, has multiple centers or nodes of power, not one. Positing different cores existing synchronically within a single time period fundamentally rewrites … a Wallersteinian core/periphery/semiperiphery model” (Friedman 2015, 153). 77

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To insist that the transpacific is not merely US-centric but polycentric shifts our critical perspective toward the identification of multiple networks of power that overlap and interconnect. Describing the transpacific as polycentric does not dissolve power relations altogether or create a field of equals. Nor does it overwrite the reality of US imperial and neocolonial power in Asia and the Pacific. It complicates the dynamics in the region, but not in a satisfyingly counterhegemonic way that promises to disrupt or unsettle existing relations of power, embodying critique through its complexity. Conceptualizing a polycentric transpacific retains the fact of uneven relations of power while pushing past fixed binaries or rigid hierarchies. The Pacific turn of transnational Asian American Studies entails new directions for the field, its relation to Asian Studies and other scholarly disciplines, and new understandings of the place of the Asian American in the US and within broader regional and global frameworks. Conceptualizing a polycentric transpacific addresses many past omissions and contradictions but also generates new potential problems. Once one recognizes the Asia/Pacific “region” as a complex, multilateral, and polycentric network of interconnections, one must also attend to new issues, such as intra-Asian tensions, the legacies of the specific histories of Asian/Pacific nations and locations, the risks of overlooking peoples at the margins of Asian America, the pitfalls of US-centric or rigid binary thinking, the dangers of positioning Asian Americans as automatically resistant, and the enduring importance of the emphasis on social justice within Asian American Studies. As we reckon with the implications of the transpacific turn in Asian American Studies, we must preserve our ties to the history of the discipline, connect with the new conditions of the present, and anticipate the developments of the future. Above all, we must recognize that Asian Americans are a diverse population, variously positioned with respect to power, standing between and also bridging the Asia/Pacific and the US, two conceptual spheres that are often viewed as distinct yet profoundly overlap.

Notes 1 Recent works that use the term “transpacific” include Choy and Wu’s Gendering the Trans-Pacific World (2017), Takezawa and Okihiro’s Trans-Pacific Japanese American Studies (2016), Sakai and Yoo’s The Trans-Pacific Imagination (2012), Künnemann and Mayer’s Trans-Pacific Interactions (2009), and Huang’s Transpacific Imaginations (2008) and Transpacific Displacement (2002). 2 For an overview of the debates and useful analysis, read Dirlik’s What is in a Rim? (1998), Wilson and Dirlik’s Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production (1995), including a key chapter by Christopher Connery; Lim et al.’s Transnational Asia Pacific (1999); Hoskins and Nguyen’s Transpacific Studies (2014); and Shu and Pease’s American Studies as Transnational Practice (2015a). Shu and Pease provide a helpful summary of “collaborations among scholars in American studies, Asian studies, Asian American studies, and transpacific studies,” with references to the work of Sucheta Mazumdar, Sau-ling Wong, Susan Koshy, Lisa Lowe, David Palumbo-Liu, Inderpal Grewal, Yunte Huang, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Erika Lee and Naoko Shibusawa, and Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen (Shu and Pease 2015b, 22–23). 3 Besides Mazumdar’s “Asian American Studies and Asian Studies: Rethinking Roots” (1991) and Lee’s The Americas of Asian American Literature (1999) one might also read Kandice Chuh’s chapter “‘Imaginary Borders’” in Chuh and Karen Shimakawa’s Orientations (2001), and Xiaojing Zhou’s introduction to Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature (2005). 4 For similar arguments about the disruptive power of Asian Americans in the US, see Lowe, “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity” (1991) and Lowe’s revision of that essay in the third chapter of Immigrant Acts (1996). Sau-ling Wong has critiqued this view of the transnational, however, arguing that Lowe “valorizes” “the migratory process” as “nomadic,” “unsettled,” “multivocal,” “heterogeneous” and “conflicting” (2017, 14). Wong identifies a potential “class bias” that might be “coded into the privileging of travel and transnational mobility in Lowe’s model” (2017, 15). 5 Bascara’s Model Minority Imperialism (2006) and Jodi Kim’s Ends of Empire (2010) are important explorations of US imperialism in Asian American studies.

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The Pacific turn 6 As the editors of Transnational Asian American Literature (2006) have noted, scholars have implicitly or explicitly assumed that Asian American literature ultimately refers back to the US: “The site of narrative perspective, albeit a narrative set in the Philippines or India or Brazil or Korea or a dystopic future, it is always assumed, is that of the United States of America” (Lim et al. 2006, 3). 7 See Davé et al. (2004), for a valuable overview of South Asian American Studies and its relation to Asian American Studies. Mixed race Asian Americans are also arguably positioned at the margins of the term Asian American, yet as Michael Omi explains in his foreword to The Sum of Our Parts: Mixed Heritage Asian Americans (Omi 2001), the study of mixed race experiences and identity generates many of the same critiques of traditional Asian American studies that the transnational turn has highlighted. According to Omi, The Sum of Our Parts disrupts the prevailing black/white paradigm of racial discourse by focusing on Asian American mixed-race identity … . This text does not essentialize the category of “Asian American” nor treat it as a uniform and monolithic group identity. Several of the essays are attentive to the specific experiences of different Asian (pan)ethnicities such as Pacific Islanders, Southeast Asians, and Filipinos. In addition, the volume does not exclusively focus on white-Asian multiracials, but explores ‘minority-minority’ positions and identities. Whiteness is decentered in this examination. (Omi 2001, x) Omi writes, “Lastly, this volume expands the interrogation of multiracial Asian identity by going beyond the borders of the United States” (Omi 2001, x). Even within the United States, “power struggles” over identity, categories, and political influence “do not simply occur across the color line, but also erupt within a community of color to reveal often invisible fault lines” (Omi 2001, xi) that can contribute to intra-Asian and intra-community tensions, for example, among Asian Americans. 8 For their specific arguments, as Suzuki puts it, “see Kauanui 2004, Diaz 2004, [and] Stillman 2004” (Suzuki 2014, 357).

Bibliography Bascara, Victor. Model Minority Imperialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Chiang, Mark. The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Chin, Frank, et al., eds. Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Choy, Catherine Ceniza, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, eds. Gendering the Trans-Pacific World. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Chuh, Kandice. “Imaginary Borders.” Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora. Eds. Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. 277–295. Chuh, Kandice. Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Chuh, Kandice. “Of Hemispheres and Other Spheres: Navigating Karen Tei Yamashita’s Literary World.” American Literary History 18. 3 (Fall 2006): 618–637. Connery, Christopher L. “Pacific Rim Discourse: The U.S. Global Imaginary in the Late Cold War Years.” Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production. Eds. Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. 30–56. Davé, Shilpa, et al. “De-privileging Positions: Indian Americans, South Asian Americans, and the Politics of Asian American Studies.” Journal of Asian American Studies 3. 1 (Feb. 2004): 67–100. Diaz, Vicente M. “‘To “P” or Not to “P”?’: Marking the Territory Between Pacific Islander and Asian American Studies.” Journal of Asian American Studies 7. 3 (Oct. 2004): 183–208. Dirlik, Arif. “Introduction: Pacific Contradictions.” What is in a Rim?: Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea. Ed. Arif Dirlik. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998a. 3–13. Dirlik, Arif, ed. What is in a Rim?: Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998b. Espiritu, Yen Le. Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

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William Nessly Fujikane, Candace. “Asian Settler Colonialism in the U.S. Colony of Hawai‘i.” Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i. Ed. Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008. 1–42. Fujikane, Candace, and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds. Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008. Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Hoskins, Janet, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, eds. Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. Huang, Yunte. Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Huang, Yunte. Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Kaplan, Amy, and Donald E. Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Kauanui, J. Kehaulani. “Asian American Studies and the ‘Pacific Question.’” Asian American Studies After Critical Mass. Ed. Kent A. Ono. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 123–143. Kim, Elaine. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. Kim, Elaine. “Preface.” Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction. Ed. Jessica Hagedorn. New York: Penguin, 1993. vii–xiv. Kim, Jodi. Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Kim, Ronyoung. Clay Walls. Sag Harbor, NY: The Permanent Press, 1987. Koshy, Susan. “Morphing Race into Ethnicity: Asian Americans and Critical Transformations of Whiteness.” boundary 2 28. 1 (Spring 2001): 153–186. Künnemann, Vanessa, and Ruth Mayer, eds. Trans-Pacific Interactions: The United States and China, 1880– 1950. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Lee, Chang-rae. A Gesture Life. New York: Riverhead-Penguin, 1999. Lee, Erika, and Naoko Shibusawa. “Guest Editor’s Introduction: What is Transnational Asian American History? Recent Trends and Challenges.” Journal of Asian American Studies 8. 3 (Oct. 2005): vii–xvii. Lee, Rachel C. The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Lee, Rachel C., ed. The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature. London: Routledge, 2014a. Lee, Rachel C. “Introduction.” The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature. Ed. Rachel C. Lee. London: Routledge, 2014b: 1–18. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, et al., eds. Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, et al., eds. Transnational Asia Pacific: Gender, Culture, and the Public Sphere. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Lowe, Lisa. “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences.” Diaspora 1. 1 (Spring 1991): 24–44. Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Lye, Colleen. America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Mazumdar, Sucheta. “Asian American Studies and Asian Studies: Rethinking Roots.” Asian Americans: Comparative and Global Perspectives. Eds. Shirley Hune et al. Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 1991. Nakanishi, Don T. “Foreword.” The Transnational Politics of Asian Americans. Eds. Christian Collet and PeiTe Lien. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009. ix–xiv. Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Omi, Michael. “Foreword.” The Sum of Our Parts: Mixed-Heritage Asian Americans. Eds. Teresa WilliamsLeón and Cynthia L. Nakashima. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001. ix–xiii. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.

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The Pacific turn Palumbo-Liu, David. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Sakai, Naoki, and Hyon Joo Yoo, eds. The Trans-Pacific Imagination: Rethinking Boundary Culture and Society. Singapore: World Scientific, 2012. Shigematsu, Setsu, and Keith L. Camacho. “Introduction: Militarized Currents, Decolonizing Futures.” Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific. Eds. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. xv–xlviii. Shu, Yuan, and Donald E. Pease, eds. American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning Toward the Transpacific. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2015a. Shu, Yuan, and Donald E. “Introduction: Transnational American Studies and the Transpacific Imaginary.” American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning Toward the Transpacific. Ed. Yuan Shu and Donald E. Pease. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2015b. 1–35. Stillman, Amy Ku’leialoha. “Pacific-ing Asian Pacific American History.” Journal of Asian American Studies 7. 3 (Oct. 2004): 241–270. Suzuki, Erin. “Transpacific.” The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature. Ed. Rachel C. Lee. London: Routledge, 2014. 352–364. Takezawa, Yasuko, and Gary Y. Okihiro, eds. Trans-Pacific Japanese American Studies: Conversations on Race and Racializations. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016. Wilson, Rob, and Arif Dirlik, eds. Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Wong, Sau-ling. “Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads.” Amerasia Journal 21. 1–2 (1995): 1–27. Zhou, Xiaojing. “Introduction: Critical Theories and Methodologies in Asian American Literary Studies.” Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature. Eds. Zhou Xiaojing and Samina Najmi. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. 3–29.

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PART II

Culture and performance Histories and reciprocities

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7 CULTURAL PERFORMANCE AND TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES Birgit M. Bauridl and Pia Wiegmink

Concepts and crossroads On August 1, 1848, roughly 400–500 white abolitionists and African Americans celebrated Emancipation Day in Rochester, New York, and commemorated not only the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies in 1838 but also staged an abolitionist protest in the United States. On April 23, 2017, the German Flossenbuerg Concentration Camp Memorial celebrated its liberation from the Nazi regime of terror by U.S. Army troops in 1945; later that year, a German-American entertainment fair in nearby Grafenwoehr enacted GermanAmerican friendship in the former, post-1945 American occupation zone. These “events”— at first sight centuries and continents apart—share conceptual elements of interest to American Studies and Performance Studies. They reverberate transnational mobilities and trajectories. As cultural performances, they bring together human bodies in particular time frames and particular spaces and thus constitute contact zones. These examples demonstrate the potential of site-specific cultural performances to negotiate and enact the social and political realities of their (transnational) sites and contexts. Ultimately, they elucidate the potential of cultural performance as a scholarly method and epistemology for the study of past and present transnational mobilities and their manifestations in concrete, local sites. First introduced by Milton Singer in the 1950s, “cultural performance” became an important concept in anthropological and ethnographic research. For Singer, “cultural performances,” i.e., festivities and rituals, were “the most concrete observable units of the cultural structure” (1972, xiii; emphasis added). Set off from everyday behavior and interaction (Guss 2000, 9), they had “a beginning and an end, an organized program of activity, a set of performers, an audience, and a place and occasion of performance” (Singer 1972, xiii). Recent scholarship has come to define “cultural performance” more broadly as “the embodied enactment of cultural forces” (McKenzie 2001, 8) to include any kind of corporeal on- and off-stage, consciously and not-consciously executed action such as theater, musical performances, protest actions, sports events, festivities and celebrations, or everyday social behavior. These diverse cultural performances share the characteristics of being culturally constitutive and of being defined by immediacy, liveness, transience, community, corporeality, encounter, eventfulness, and by their site-specificity. Contemporary scholars from diverse fields continue to develop and adapt the concept to current interdisciplinary research trends. In 85

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2005, Diana Taylor highlighted the power of cultural performance to create embodied cultural memory in her idea of the “repertoire.” Judith Butler took a decidedly political perspective when she discussed the performative character of public gatherings in her 2015 Performative Theory of Assembly. For American Studies, cultural performance is a suitable object and matrix of inquiry to investigate political, social, and cultural negotiations and power struggles triggered by transnational processes. The pathways of transnational mobilities meet and become manifest in concrete, local places, i.e., in contact zones, where they produce cultural encounters and generate likewise localized, concrete, and non-textual cultural practices that debate these encounters. Thus, cultural performances can be meeting grounds of diverse cultures and players; they can function as a public arena within which these encounters are acted out; and they can negotiate the power dynamics informing these encounters. In methodological terms, the study of transnational processes via cultural performance offers a different and enriching way of scholarly epistemology; it shifts the focus of inquiry away from texts towards non-textual cultural practices. Whereas scholars like Marie Louise Pratt or John Carlos Rowe conceived the (transnational) contact zone primarily as a textual space (Pratt 1991, 34; Rowe 2002, 12), we propose to explore it as a cultural event and to scrutinize the epistemological, communal, and political implications of this shift from text to performance. Performance Studies scholars such as Dwight Conquergood, David Román, or Joseph Roach present “performance as a counterbalance to the weight and prestige given texts in the academy … as representations of knowledge” (Conquergood 2013, 58). In Taylor’s work on cultural memory in the Americas, her distinction between the “archive” and the “repertoire” likewise suggests a reorientation towards performance. Whereas the “archive” consists of supposedly enduring and (more) stable materials like texts, visuals, or objects (Conquergood 2003, 19), the repertoire “enacts embodied memory: performance, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing – in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge …” (Conquergood 2003, 20; emphasis added). These scholars consider culture as performative and emphasize the usefulness of a Performance Studies approach—the epistemological parameters produced by cultural performances, enriching and at times even distinct from textual epistemologies—for the study of cultural processes and encounters. The concept of cultural performance allows scholars to perceive culture less as a stable, fixed construct but as an ongoing process. Yet despite these fleeting and presumably hard-to-pin-down qualities, cultural performance as a methodology provides a suitable frame of analysis that invites scholars to investigate core parameters—sites, bodies, audiences, actions, time frames, and processes of community formation—of particular, material cultural performances as exemplary, concrete, embodied manifestations of ongoing cultural processes. The fleeting quality of performance oftentimes needs the methodological assistance of archival materials and the assembling of available reports, recordings, or witnesses of a performance into a comprehensive “scenario” (Taylor 2003, 28) of the performance. Nevertheless, grasping the epistemologies and politics of concrete cultural performances—via their sites, bodies, presences—produces epistemologies of oftentimes fleeting and abstract transnational phenomena. An emphasis on cultural performance as a material and methodological paradigm for the study of cultural processes entails an emphasis on its politics and its cultural, social, and political impacts. Cultural performances are not merely cultural representations of given realities—they must rather be considered producers of these very realities. As early as 1970, anthropologist Victor Turner emphasized both the affirmative and transgressive potential of cultural performance emerging from its liminality. In collaboration with Richard Schechner, 86

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Turner also provided a model for the study of the interrelation between cultural performance and “social drama” (Turner 1982): Cultural performance came to be seen not only as a mirror of but also as a driving, problem-solving force for social and political crises. Scholars like John MacAloon, Dwight Conquergood, Philip Zarilli, Jon McKenzie, or Elizabeth Dillon emphasize the efficacy, agency, and politics inherent in cultural performance. Accordingly, David Guss insists on the “ability [of cultural performance] to produce new meanings and relations” (Guss 2000, 11). This “transformative power” (Fischer-Lichte 2008) makes cultural performance a primary field of inquiry for the study of contact zones in which “cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (Pratt 1991, 34) and which constantly require a reconfiguration of its diverse identities and the relations amongst them. Cultural performances thus emerge in contact zones, and as live, communal, and audience-based events they bear the potential to create ever-new contact zones. For this reason, we consider cultural performances as “site-specific, corporeal events and practices that constitute spatially and temporally confined encounters and physical, immediate spaces of transnational experience” (Bauridl and Wiegmink 2015, 161). In the following analyses of the 1848 celebration of Emancipation Day in Rochester, New York, and of the 2017 commemoration of liberation at the Flossenbuerg Concentration Camp Memorial and the German-American Volksfest in Bavaria, we will examine the politics, epistemologies, and communal functions of cultural performance at the crossroads of transnational trajectories.

Antebellum African American performances of August 1 Nineteenth-century celebrations of August 1, also referred to as Emancipation Day or West India Day, commemorated an event that was at first sight of little relevance for the United States. Nevertheless, for African Americans in the antebellum North this became probably the most important memorial day. As Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie estimates, celebrations of August 1 “were probably among the largest independent gatherings by people of African descent in nineteenth-century America” and it would not be until after WWI that similarly large groups of African Americans would parade in the US (2007, 107). August 1 was celebrated in both white (abolitionist) and black communities, and the festivities took on many different forms, from early church-based events to large-scale antislavery picnics and urban parades.1 During these events, Americans came together at a specific date and in a specific place to commemorate a transnational event, i.e., the peaceful abolition of slavery in the British West Indies in 1838.2 To study ritualized cultural practices like the commemoration of August 1 offers one possible pathway into examining the ways in which the fight against slavery substantially permeated the everyday lives and routines of black and white Northerners in the antebellum United States, and it also represents an apt possibility of assessing the transnational features of American abolitionism and their manifestations in Northern African American communities.3 Emancipation Day was set up in direct opposition to the most prominent national festivity, the celebration of Independence Day on July 4 (Kachun 2003, 86). While July 4 celebrates independence from British tyranny, August 1 praises “Great Britain as a friend of freedom” (Jeffrey 2006, 205). Furthermore, as Julie Roy Jeffrey observes, “[b]lack and white abolitionists interpreted the end of slavery in the British West Indies not as a local but as a cosmic event” (Jeffrey 2006, 205; emphasis added). As a result, celebrating August 1 also represented a critical inquiry into what historian Edmund Morgan referred to as “the American paradox,” namely that a nation proclaiming “all men are created equal” enslaves a large proportion of its inhabitants and denies them their “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (2003, 6). 87

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Although “oral culture played a vital role in the construction of political identities,” scholars of abolition are primarily interested in interpreting print cultures, as Kerr-Ritchie notes (2007, 3). Kerr-Ritchie’s observation corresponds with Taylor’s critique of privileging the archive over the repertoire. To pay more attention to the repertoire, however, emphasizes both the relevance of spoken word and its embeddedness in performative practices. Furthermore, such a shift in both perspective and methodology inevitably also results in stressing non-verbal cultural practices and considers how these practices shape local, national, as well as transnational cultures, politics, and ultimately, identities. As theatre historian Thomas Postlewait advises his students: “What historians see—or fail to see—depends upon not only where but how they look” (2009, 101). The following analysis of one (predominantly African American) August 1 celebration, which took place in Rochester, New York, on the tenth anniversary of Emancipation Day in 1848, demonstrates how a Performance Studies’ approach to the study of American abolition will prove a valuable tool for research in Transnational American Studies. On July 14, 1848, The North Star, Frederick Douglass’ newspaper published in Rochester, New York, printed the following call to attend the upcoming August 1 celebration: “Let the friends of freedom gather, and make the occasion-memorable. Let every colored man and woman within two hundred miles’ distance of this city see to it that at the appointed hour they are in Washington Square, Rochester” (The North Star 1848a). The “order of the day,” published on the same page, announces the sequence in which the participants will march from Ford Street Baptist Church to Washington Square. The “procession” includes musicians at the head of group, benevolent societies, school children, speakers, and citizens among other people. The “exercises” at the Square consist of prayers, music, and several speeches (“Freedom’s Jubilee”). In the subsequent coverage in local newspapers and in The North Star we learn about “the general good feeling and happiness which seemed to prevail among the participants of the celebration” (who are altogether estimated at 1,500–2,000) and get to know that a fair and a ball followed the “large and respectable procession” (The North Star 1848c). It is via these archived documents that we gain a fragmentary (and subjective) access to the event. In order to “retrieve” a cultural performance from the past, scholars depend on the archive. However, as Taylor reminds us, rather than privileging the text over other modes of expression, “we could also look to scenarios as meaning-making paradigms that structure social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes” (2003, 28). According to Taylor, “scenarios” are tools that depend on both archival documents and performative features in order to analyse an event. An interpretation of the given event, which tries to grasp the performative character of the event, will emphasize the following aspects: First, the very fact that such a large number of (mostly) African Americans gathered in the streets of Rochester, and thus became in a very literal sense physically present in the public sphere, is already in itself significant. As Judith Butler reminds us in Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly: If we consider why freedom of assembly is separate from freedom of expression, it is precisely because the power that people have to gather together is itself an important political prerogative, quite distinct from the right to say whatever they have to say once people have gathered. The gathering signifies in excess of what is said, and that mode of signification is a concerted bodily enactment, a plural form of performativity. (Butler 2015, 8) 88

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Regardless of the discrimination that many black participants might have experienced in their everyday lives, by “exercising a bodily and performative right to appear” (Butler 2015, 11), the participants in the celebration of August 1 claim physical, bodily recognition and political visibility. Given the fact that this “right to appear” is claimed in a nation that deprives enslaved African Americans of any rights, the celebration must also be considered a bold act of protesting the peculiar institution in public. Second, the form of the gathering on August 1 further impacts the public reception and the political claims that are related to the appearance of African Americans in public space. As the newspaper reports indicate, the parade was “headed by Adams’ Brass Band,” a choir sung “Freedom’s Ode,” and music preluded each oratory (The North Star 1848b, 1848c). During the Civil Rights Movement, music, and in particular so-called freedom songs, were “the heart and soul of the movement” but also “a highly practical tool” (Reed 2005, 14). Sung collectively in church but also during protest marches and in prison, freedom songs represented the singers’ dedication to non-violent resistance, and they functioned as sources of communal mental resilience during the highly stressful protest events when many participants faced the threat of severe physical danger. It might very well have been for these particular reasons that music also featured prominently during August 1 celebrations. Similar to the Civil Rights Movement, during August 1 celebrations, music was performed collectively and thus provided participants with a sense of community. This community presented itself as peaceful, joyous, and thus non-threatening. Third, an analysis of a cultural performance like August 1 draws attention to groups of people that were not or could not be addressed via print culture. As Mitch Kachun observes, with literacy rates generally low among free African Americans, … public commemorations provided an important opportunity to reach a segment of black communities who might otherwise remain unreachable. Many who did not … read pamphlets and newspapers … were … attracted by festive public events. (2003, 46) Celebrations of transnational abolitionist events like those of August 1 thus provided the diverse groups of participants with an immediate and corporeal experience that transgressed demarcations of class (as well as gender) and created a collective experience for members of African American and antislavery communities that had no access to print culture. Fourth, August 1 commemorations were carefully staged public performances that were repeated each year and that followed a certain dramaturgy. Participants, that is, actors and spectators, experienced the festive event as special and set off from the routines of everyday life. At the same time, these events were also inextricably entwined with the everyday lives of their participants: The experiences of joy and merriment as well as the fear of mob violence were feelings that had a very real impact on the everyday lives of free African Americans and abolitionists in the North. It is the “double identity” of performance as an event set off from everyday life yet also part of it, which produces the transformative power of cultural performance (Postlewait 2009, 119). Because any kind of performance creates an experience of a temporary, yet real community, (cultural) performances can function as rehearsals for alternative forms of togetherness. Accordingly, David Guss observes, “what is important is that cultural performances be recognized as sites of social action where identities and relations are continually being reconfigured” (2000, 12). Celebrations of August 1 communally commemorated a transnational past event of high relevance for the common identity of abolitionists and African Americans. Participants envisioned the possibility of a future society in which all 89

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African Americans are free, in which they are not discriminated against, and in which they are perceived as respectable citizens. They did so by participating in an activity that was set off from the daily routines and experiences of racism of their everyday lives. The celebrations of a transnational event created a contact zone, a space of encounter for a diverse group of people, which was socially and politically distinct and which functioned as a model for envisioning the future. To consider these practices as cultural performances thus allows us to conceive of them as public political acts in which diverse groups of people not only experience an event together in a particular time and space, it also enables us to consider celebrations like August 1 as cultural practices which not merely argued for the necessity to abolish slavery but which publicly performed, i.e., acted out a vision for a future togetherness without slavery. Such an approach allows scholars to perceive and discuss public contestations of prevalent notions of US American identity, citizenship, and discourses of national in- and exclusion that are not exclusively verbally articulated and recorded in print. It also enables scholars to examine formations, affiliations, and manifestations of cultural practices of nineteenth-century African American identity that clearly transgress the confines of the nation.

German-American encounters and epistemologies of embodied performance On April 8, 1945, the US Airforce bombed a German Wehrmacht military training area in the German State of Bavaria a few days before troops occupied the adjacent rural town of Grafenwoehr. On April 23, 1945, US Army troops liberated the nearby Flossenbuerg concentration camp from the Nazi reign of terror. The military grounds of the perpetrators of Flossenbuerg turned into the space most visibly and imperially occupied by the liberators of Flossenbuerg. Since 1945, the towns of Flossenbuerg and Grafenwoehr have been linked in a transnational German-American vortex of liberation, occupation, (Cold War) symbiosis, and cultural encounters. Ben Chappell’s concept of “small transnationalism” (Chappell 2016, 44, 46) aptly applies to the region. It zooms in on particular—albeit blurry in terms of borders— local and regional spaces that have become crossroads of transnational pathways and stages of ensuing negotiations of cultural encounters. As site-specific, potentially transgressive or affirmative events (McKenzie 2001, 30, 31), the cultural performances of the region shape the epistemologies of their particular transnational site. Vice versa, the transnational GermanAmerican contact zone of Grafenwoehr/Flossenbuerg can be approached via cultural performance as material and methodology of investigation. The contemporary Grafenwoehr Training Area (GTA), one of the largest US military bases in Europe, generates a large civilian and cultural American presence. The on-base German-American Volksfest (entertainment fair) attracts up to 150,000 visitors annually. A few miles from Grafenwoehr and from the former Iron Curtain, in the past decade(s) Flossenbuerg has been turned into a “European site of memory” and pays tribute to the diverse national backgrounds of prisoners of the Nazi regime and to its post-liberation use as a camp for prisoners of war and, subsequently, for displaced persons. Like Grafenwoehr, Flossenbuerg prismatically reflects the region’s characteristics as a post-war German-American contact zone: liberated by US soldiers, it attracts visitors from the GTA, and both liberated and liberators regularly attend commemorative events and choreographies such as Liberation Day. The Volksfest and Liberation Day share major characteristics. First, they constitute cultural performances. Second, both are inherently site-specific and indebted to their location’s diachronic and synchronic particularities: a history of German-American encounters since 1945 90

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and an American presence in a contact zone located outside the United States. Given the continued co-presence of two (heterogeneous) national groups, both performances create ever-new cultural encounters via their audience. Third, both performances negotiate and construct the (trans-)cultural epistemologies of the site from which they emerge. On April 23, 2017, the Flossenbuerg Concentration Camp Memorial commemorated the anniversary of its liberation. As a materialization of the site’s past and present, the event brought together survivors, witnesses, and their relatives from diverse European nations, e.g. Leon Weintraub from Łódz´, now living in Sweden; as well as from the United States, e.g. Jack Terry, Polish-American speaker of the former Flossenbuerg inmates; a Polish military band; German and Bavarian political representatives, e.g. State Secretary Albert Füracker; US military representatives from the nearby Grafenwoehr Training Area; US Consul General from Munich, Jennifer Gavito; as well as an array of inter/national and regional visitors. Commemorative speeches; a testimony by Yves Durnez, son of survivor Marcel Durnez, translated from Dutch into German by the granddaughter; music; the vague background noise of multilingual translations from headphones in the audience; an international group of young people portraying their experiences of Flossenbuerg as a seminar site; the dedication of commemorative wreaths at the Square of Nations in the so-called Valley of Death—these are just some examples of the choreography. The cultural performance at Flossenbuerg commemorates trauma and liberation; yet as an enactment of counter memory, it constructs a future-oriented epistemology of un-repeating. Emphasizing the potential of performance as a mode of investigation for trajectories of memory production, Taylor notes that the “repertoire,” i.e., “embodied practice” functions “as an episteme and a praxis, a way of knowing as well as a way of storing and transmitting cultural knowledge” (Taylor 2003, 278). The local site, that is, the historical space of Nazi terror and of liberation, is part and parcel of the embodied memory and performative politics of Liberation Day. The event makes use of the resistant 4 potential of performance and serves as a multidirectional epistemology of remembering the past in order to avoid future trauma (see Hebel 2008; Sturken 1997), i.e., future “social drama” (Turner 1982, 61–88). Scholars of Transnational American Studies and Memory Studies have recently begun to call for “new theoretical frameworks, … new methodological tools, and … new sites … for studying collective remembrance beyond the nation-state” (De Cesari and Rigney 2014, 2; also see Hebel 2010; Rothberg 2009). An approach to Liberation Day via performance emphasizes the cultural, social, and political site-specificity of the event and provides new perspectives on its impetus and politics. The site’s transnational past as a concentration camp imprisoning diverse national and cultural identities as well as the location’s present as a transnational contact zone of visitors and employees presupposes the heterogeneity of the community that comes together for the commemorative event. Whose memory is it then? Is it a commemoration of trauma, of survival, of liberation, of guilt? The cultural performance as a whole allows and requires all these readings. The commemorative act becomes a communal transnational performance of memory. As a live event characterized by materiality, visible and tangible bodies, and especially their co-presence, it generates a community, or “communitas” (Turner 1982, 44, 47). This community reflects the transnational history of the specific site of Flossenbuerg and the multi-nationality of perpetrators, victims, and liberators. It also mirrors the transnational composition of the performance’s location and its inhabitants. In 2017, the Flossenbuerg region is characterized by the heterogeneity of multiple presences, ranging from German to American, from the nation of perpetrators to the nation of liberators, as well as to descendants of victims or displaced Persons living in the area. Itself a contact zone, the region partakes in the 2017 Liberation Day and the joint 91

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endeavor and epistemology of counter memory. Albeit only part of the larger transnational community of Liberation Day, the region nevertheless experiences itself as a community in the here and now—a prerequisite for a positive future co-habitation of the transnational contact zone that hosts the event. Similarly, the Volksfest constitutes a condensed enactment of the symbiotic needs of its transnational environment—the US base, e.g., offers a large percentage of employments in the area. Like Liberation Day, the Volksfest captures the negotiations of the historical and contemporary German-American contact zone. The event hosts multifarious micro-performances ranging from staged formats such as American Dirndl-and-Lederhosen contests, line dance performances by German groups, or country, rock, and Bavarian folk music; to choreographed procedures such as showing your ID and entering the heavily guarded space of the Volksfest on military grounds; to the behavioral end of the performative spectrum such as folk dancing or eating stereotypical German or American food. The performative impetus ranges from national, cultural, or imperial affirmation to the appropriation of cultural behavior in order to conspicuously demonstrate one’s mastering of the “other’s” culture. A Performance Studies approach captures the impact of spaces characterized by small transnationalisms on everyday behavior. It allows us to trace the trajectories of transnational appropriation of behavior as a form of embodied cultural memory. Referencing Richard Schechner’s concept of “restored/twice-behaved behavior” (Schechner 1985, 36), Taylor argues: “Performances function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory … through reiterated, … ‘twice-behaved behavior’” (Taylor 2003, 2). She establishes a link between presumably ephemeral, embodied “individual instances of performance” (Taylor 2003, 20); their reiteration and hence “continuation” by new agents in new environments; and the thus emerging lasting qualities of cultural “memor[y]” and “knowledge” (Taylor 2003, 21). A plethora of German and American booths at the Volksfest sell stereotypical food. When Americans engage in the physical behavior of eating Bratwurst or when Germans eat burgers, they reiterate (stereotypical) strips of the other culture’s (presumed) restored behavior—an ability enhanced by the performers’ mutual cultural familiarity due to the co-presence in the contact zone. Via the corporeal practice of eating, the cross-cultural performers acquire embodied (and sensory) knowledge of the other culture’s food. This knowledge potentially impacts the assessment of future repetitions of cross-cultural food consumption and facilitates a self-fashioning as interculturally experienced to the transnational audience of the contact zone. Cross-cultural eating may have become normalized due to general processes of globalization or due to the long experience of cultural exchange in the Grafenwoehr contact zone. Nevertheless, with “cultural memory” being “an embodied practice” (Taylor 2003, 50), the performers perpetuate “American” or “German” cultural behavior and perform “American” or “German” cultural memory. Yet any labeling as “German” or “American” is itself a flexible process and already a reflection of the negotiations in the contact zone; and, after all, in cross-cultural eating, the performer and the performance’s presumed epistemology differ in terms of nation. Eating Bratwurst and eating burgers become transnational acts. While globalization may have dispersed Bratwurst in America, an American eating Bratwurst at the Volksfest in Grafenwoehr is a product of and negotiates the specific contact zone. Likewise, the meaning of eating a Bratwurst for Germans or eating a burger for Americans exceeds and complicates any classification as stereotypical repetition of one’s “own” restored behavior. If cultural performance partakes in the struggles over cultural power at its site, eating “innerculturally” continues one’s “own” embodied repertoire and memory in the face of potential interferences by another culture’s presence. Like cross-cultural eating, the repetition of one’s 92

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(presumed) “own” cultural behavior—within the particular frame of the transnational site as a meaning-making paradigm—is itself generated by the dynamics of the contact zone. Eating a burger or a Bratwurst at the Volksfest inevitable becomes embodied cultural memory of the transnational cultural processes and phenomena of the transnational post-WWII contact zone. Evidently, an approach via cultural performance allows us to grasp the politics of the seemingly casual and a-political actions of the transnational contact zone. As Elizabeth Dillon maintains in a different context: “Significantly, as well, performance is a key category through which the part of no part—the people out of doors—achieves visibility …” (Dillon 2014, 13).

Conclusion Dillon’s statement aptly captures the common ground of both nineteenth-century Emancipation Day celebrations and contemporary performances in Flossenbuerg and Grafenwoehr. While on August 1, African Americans enact their desired participation in the national, social, cultural, and political site of their very performance, Liberation Day in Flossenbuerg makes visible those who were “the part of no part” during the Nazi reign of terror, and eating at the German-American Volksfest represents the power of the performance of those who are, in Dillon’s sense, metaphorically “out of doors,” i.e., not part of official and clearly demarcated stagings. Dillon points to the politically, socially, culturally, and epistemologically constructive and constitutive quality of cultural performance. Rochester, Flossenbuerg, and Grafenwoehr all become the site of cultural performances that use the material, immediate potential of performance to literally make visible and inscribe the past and present presence of diverse groups into the site from which these cultural performances emerge. It is African Americans that enact their presence in a predominantly white America—a presence that resulted from the transnational system of slavery and the enforced mobilities of the Middle Passage; it is Germans and Americans that negotiate their cultural presence in the contact zone of Grafenwoehr; it is the victims of Flossenbuerg that receive a counter voice in the contemporary transnational commemorative act. The particularities of the respective sites— sites of performance and sites of cultural contact—impact the meaning of the performance. Marching, singing, and celebrating in the public sphere of a nation that still maintains slavery, African Americans embody presence, that is, their right of (cultural and political) participation. Displaying embodied cultural memory in a German-American contact zone becomes a form of either cultural empowerment or cross-cultural appropriation. Making use of the affirmative, transgressive, or resistant potential of performance, cultural performances constitute condensed versions of the dynamics and the, at times desired and envisioned, communities of the respective sites. All three sample performances discussed are impacted by transnational trajectories: Rochester by the global economies of slavery and the public commemoration of a transnational event in the West Indies; Flossenbuerg by the imprisonment of diverse European identities, liberation, and the continued American presence, which also affects Grafenwoehr. All three events are concrete manifestations of the larger transnational dynamics of their sites. As a subject of inquiry, these cultural performances offer a contribution and fresh perspective to the study of transnational crossroads and processes for American Studies. As a method of inquiry, cultural performance enables us to tackle the tension between the more abstract, hard-to-grasp, and oftentimes fleeting pathways of transnational processes and the very local sites and identities affected by and participating in these processes. It offers the opportunity to 93

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locate and examine past and present transnational mobilities and movements at their junctions within particular local sites and periods of time.

Notes 1 See in particular chapter three of Kerr-Ritchie’s Rites of August 1, which examines the transformation of August 1 within black Northern communities from the 1830s to the 1850s (2007, 82–117). Julie Jeffrey gives an overview of how August 1 celebrations differed within black and white communities (2006). For further explorations, see also Kachun (2003, 54–96); McDaniel (2005); and Rugemer (2008, 222–57). 2 On August 1, 1834, the British Slavery Abolition Act became effective. The Act initiated the (predominantly) peaceful official end of slavery in the British Caribbean but was, however, followed by an apprenticeship system that ended in 1838. 3 Kerr-Ritchie’s Rites of August First is a prime example of such an endeavor. 4 See McKenzie (2001), who adds “resistant” to the Turnerian functions of performance as “affirmative” or “transgressive.”

Bibliography Bauridl, Birgit M., and Pia Wiegmink. “Toward an Integrative Model of Performance in Transnational American Studies.” Amerikastudien / American Studies 60. 1 (2015): 157–168. Butler, Judith. Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Chappell, Ben. “The Borders that Cross Us: Ethnographic Sensibilities for Transnational American Studies.” Approaching Transnational America in Performance. Eds. Birgit M. Bauridl and Pia Wiegmink. Frankfurt: Lang, 2016. 35–56. Conquergood, Dwight. “Beyond the Text: Towards a Performative Cultural Politics.” Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis. Ed. and introd. E. Patrick Johnson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. 47–61. Conquergood, Dwight. “Of Caravans and Carnivals: Performance Studies in Motion.” The Drama Review 39. 4 (1995): 137–141. De Cesari, Chiara, and Ann Rigney. “Introduction.” Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. 1–25. Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. New York: Routledge, 2008. Guss, David M. The Festive State: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Hebel, Udo J. “In Lieu of an Epilogue: Whereto American(ist) Memory Studies?” The Merits of Memory: Concepts, Context, Debates. Eds. Hans-Jürgen Grabbe and Sabine Schindler. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. 389–395. Hebel, Udo J. “Sites of Memory in U.S.-American Histories and Cultures.” A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010. 47–60. Jeffrey, Julie Roy. “‘No Occurrence in Human History Is More Deserving of Commemoration Than This’: Abolitionist Celebrations of Freedom.” Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism. Eds. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer. New York: New Press, 2006. 200–219. Kachun, Mitchell A. Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808–1915. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. Kerr-Ritchie, J.R. Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. MacAloon, John. Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance. Ed. John MacAloon. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984. McDaniel, Caleb. “The Fourth and the First: Abolitionist Holidays, Respectability, and Radical Interracial Reform.” American Quarterly 57. 1 (2005): 129–151. McKenzie, Jon. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London: Routledge, 2001. Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom. 1975. New York: Norton, 2003.

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Cultural performance and TAS Postlewait, Thomas. The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pratt, Marie Louise. “The Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 91 (1991): 33–40. Reed, T.V. The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Román, David. Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the Performing Arts. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Rowe, John C. “A Future for American Studies: A Comparative U.S. Cultures Model.” The New American Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. 3–17. Rugemer, Edward B. The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Schechner, Richard. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. Singer, Milton B. When a Great Tradition Modernizes: An Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilization. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 1972. Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publisher, 1982. The North Star. “First of August.” July 14, 1848a. Accessible Archives. The North Star. “First of August Celebration.” August 4, 1848b. Accessible Archives. The North Star. “First of August Celebration, Notices.” August 11, 1848c. Accessible Archives. Web. The North Star. “Freedom’s Jubilee: Celebrations at Rochester, Tuesday, August 1st, 1848.” July 14, 1848d. Accessible Archives. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publisher, 1982. Turner, Victor. “Images and Reflections: Ritual, Drama, Carnival, Film, and the Spectacle in Cultural Performance.” The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ, 1988. 21–32. Turner, Victor. The Anthropology of Performance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Zarilli, Phillip B. “For Whom Is the King a King? Issues of Intercultural Production, Perception, and Reception in a Kathakali King Lear.” Critical Theory and Performance. Eds. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. 108–134.

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8 THE BARBARY FRONTIER AND TRANSNATIONAL ALLEGORIES OF FREEDOM Karim Bejjit

Introduction Over the last decade or so, fresh critical explorations of the Barbary frontier have come to shape a distinct and important terrain in American Studies. Although past US diplomatic and naval encounters with North African states, notably Algiers and Tripoli, have traditionally received a great deal of attention among American historians, it is only lately that the Barbary episode has spurred a flurry of critical interest and generated a continuing debate about its impact on the politics of the early republic and relevance to current geopolitical American interests. Recent scholarly publications have thrown new light on a wide range of questions bearing as much on past historical actualities as on their complex reconfigurations in literary and dramatic texts of the early post-revolutionary period. New reprints and annotated editions of early American accounts of captivity in Barbary have also contributed to this revival of interest and helped resurrect an old and almost forgotten literary heritage.1 In this chapter, my aim consists first in offering a broad critical survey of the cultural context in which this renewed and varied American engagement with the Barbary phenomenon is anchored. As much as one wants to insulate these belated and nuanced voices from the vociferous clamor that followed in the wake of 9/11 tragic incidents, it is nonetheless futile to try to mitigate the sustained ideological fallout of this conjuncture or pretend to expunge the lineaments of its violent ethos. The narrative of the Barbary Wars has for the most part been a monolingual one dominated by a triumphalist impulse. There is a strong need today for welldocumented counter narratives that highlight the complex socio-economic structures of precolonial North African polities and their troubled relations with the United States and European powers beyond the reductive and recycled slogans of being piratical and terror-sponsoring states. Given the paucity of alternative readings reflecting North African perspectives on these early encounters, the discursive ascendency of the European and American narratives will likely remain unchallenged. What redeems this rather murky picture of the Barbary affair, however, is the increasing vigor and originality displayed in recent American scholarship itself since it has foregrounded obscure vistas of this remote encounter and endeavored to reinstate the primacy of the old recits. In the second part of this chapter, drawing on this burgeoning critical discourse, I 96

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address the terms and modes of enactment of the Barbary captivity experience in early American plays, and accentuate the rich and powerful symbolism pertaining to the question of freedom inherent in their creative investment of the Barbary frontier.

Refashioning Barbary In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist incidents, a series of articles appeared in US printed and electronic media drawing peculiar parallels between the hijackers and the Barbary corsairs. The “Barbary analogy”,2 as this lopsided comparison became known in subsequent historical scholarship, was premised on the claim that the depredations of the “Barbary pirates” against American trade in the Mediterranean and the captivity of American seamen in Algiers and Tripoli constituted early acts of terror against the nascent American nation and represented a compelling and instructive proof of the inveterate Muslim hostility against Christians. The advocates of this unbridled discourse (Leiby, Jewett, London, and Wheelan among others), influenced by the belligerent political climate that swept over the country, were content to offer sketchy and rather celebratory accounts of the relations between the young republic and North African states emphasizing the proactive agency of early American political establishment to confront and defeat Muslim foes militarily and ideologically. As Paul Silverstein (2005) has pointed out, these narratives served as “a potent arm in the ideological battle that has paralleled the post-September 11th war on terror,” and were inscribed in the broad contemporary ideological debate on the “clash of civilizations” (2005, 183). Even in the early 1990s, following American military involvement in the Middle East, the Barbary affair was reframed and its vocabulary reinvented to keep up with the shifting American political interests in the region. The appropriation of the Barbary scene in the accounts of Whipple (1991) and Allison (1995), for instance, was overtly politicized and guided by a desire to demonstrate the continuing relevance of former US conflicts with North Africans to the contemporary geopolitical landscape. Whipple’s reconstruction of US war with Tripoli (1801–1805), however, betrays a slim grip on the historical intricacies of the period and, as one reviewer once noted, it amounts to a “travesty” shot through with numerous imprecisions (Dunne 1991, 563). Allison, on his part, consistently conflates Algiers with the broad and fuzzy nomenclature, “the Muslim World” in his narrative, and endeavors to show how the conflict with Barbary was perceived by early Americans “as part of the contest between Christians and Muslims” (Allison 1995, xv). His rendition of the Barbary scene and of the collective attitudes of early Americans toward this unfamiliar realm across the Atlantic not only hinges on a thin layer of archival evidence, but is also infused with strong moralizing rhetoric. In more recent scholarship, American historians such as Richard Parker and Frank Lambert have taken pains to resituate America’s early encounters with Algiers and Tripoli in their proper worldly contexts. As a veteran US diplomat with almost a decade of service in North Africa, and as a connoisseur of the region’s chronic political imbroglios, Parker shows how engagement with the Barbary experience represents a beginning moment in US diplomatic history reflecting, through its protracted process, the genuine challenges faced and ultimate policies followed by early US officials at home and abroad to resolve old crises. In his concluding chapter, Parker warns his readers of the misleading and dangerous analogies drawn between past and present conflicts with Muslim states. In the same cautionary spirit, Frank Lambert argues that the Barbary Wars far from “being holy wars… were an extension of America’s War of Independence” (2005, 8), and thus not only have to be tied to a background of conflicting commercial interests among maritime nations in the Mediterranean and 97

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across the Atlantic, but also read in the light of the contingencies and constraints of a fledging US political system. Lambert notes that while the consolidation of a federal power and the establishment of a navy had been mired in domestic controversy, the Barbary conflict and the prolonged captivity of US sailors in Algiers and Tripoli gave both momentum and legitimacy to the efforts seeking the empowerment of the American federal institutions. In focusing on national politics, these reified narratives of the Barbary Wars laid the ground for more elaborate investigations of the social and cultural ramifications of these early events. Steering the debate away from the post 9/11 raucous discourse, David Dzurec (2009), for instance, explores early American archival materials that document American citizens’ perceptions of and reactions to the crisis of captives in Algiers in the 1790s. The American press, he argues, played a major role in educating the public about the ongoing affair with Algiers. Letters of captives printed in American newspapers, petitions addressed to Congress calling for immediate action, and theatrical performances enacting the plight of compatriots held in Barbary were part of a growing dynamic American “public sphere”. If the conflict with Algiers triggered debate within the political class about the most expedient ways to resolve the crisis and free US captives, it also enabled the American public to exert influence on government and manifest vibrant forms of collective agency. In his well-researched study, Lawrence Peskin (2009) also investigates the profound impact of US encounters with Algiers and Tripoli on the social dynamics of post-revolutionary America and ultimately on its evolution as a global power in the early nineteenth century. Peskin offers a rich account of the public engagement with the information circulated in print on the sullen predicament of fellow citizens held in Algiers. Galvanized by the vehement appeal of their compatriots, and frustrated by the apathetic attitude of their own officials, Americans endeavored to collect funds for the ransom of the captives. Their efforts did not enjoy official support and ultimately bore meager results. However, as Peskin shows, the crisis with Algiers furnished a productive context for reflection on the questions of slavery, freedom, and national identity in new and quite challenging terms. Of particular relevance to this chapter is Peskin’s attempt to highlight the anti-slavery drift in American literary and dramatic texts of the late eighteenth century set in Barbary. The trope of the white American slave undergoing torture and abuse at the hand of hostile Turks or Moors only thinly masks the stark irony of rampant slavery practices at home, and exposes the paradoxes of contemporary racial discourse. As I make the point in the following section, American playwrights were able to appropriate the stage in order to challenge masculinist notions about race and gender and drive home strong liberal messages about the indivisible human right to freedom. Building on the work of Benilde Montgomery and Joseph C. Schöpp who have set the tone for this new mode of revisionary readings, I attempt to investigate the allegorical nature of these motifs and their camouflaged political implications for early Americans. Algiers and Tripoli indeed supplied the symbolic spaces of alterity on to which were projected domestic images of racial and sexual discrimination. Another important strand in the proliferating discourse on early Barbary literature has emphasized its genealogical ties to contemporary studies on political Islam. In Orientalism, Edward Said had qualified early contact between the United States and pre-colonial North Africa as having limited influence on the growth of American Orientalism, which otherwise, in his view, gained vitality and relevancy only in the post-World War II era particularly among a new generation of social scientists (Said 1991, 290). Recent publications, however, succeeded in confirming the significant place of US Barbary literature in the study of American cultural history, particularly in its relation to Islam and Muslim nations.3 Timothy Marr (2006), for instance, has drawn attention to the multiple uses of the Barbary scene by 98

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early American writers to celebrate the moral high grounds of the new republic over despotic nations. Americans, he observes, inherited rather rigid notions of Islam as intertwined with tyranny, and in their imaginative undertakings they drew on their secular democratic repertory to challenge and mock traditions and practices sanctified by Islamic tenets. In a similar vein, Anouar Majid argues that America’s early encounter with Islam was shaped at once by old religious doctrines and modern political principles (Majid 2004, 64). However, if American construction of the Barbary landscape reveals a fortified sense of national pride, it also evinces a critical energy to address lingering paradoxes such as slavery. The anti-slavery agency that informs captivity narratives employed the Barbary setting to subvert entrenched domestic racial beliefs. In the process, as Majid puts it, these texts “presented a complex picture of African and Arab landscapes, and were used to strengthen the abolitionist cause” (Majid 2004, 84). One of the fortunate outcomes of these multiple excavations of the Barbary frontier invigorated by their cross-disciplinary approaches is the reclaiming of old texts which had never counted more than entertaining popular narratives, and at best treated as marginal literature. The remarkable diversity and ambivalence of these texts pose a real challenge for readers accustomed to a narrative of American exceptionalism. The plays I discuss in the following pages feature characters who confront Barbary space less as acclaimed heroes than plain citizens who happen to be stripped of their freedom. Since imagined Barbary concentrated in its own realm the evils that emanate from human bondage and despotic government, it served as a stage not only to discredit decadent power structure and ethics, but also to preach American audiences about the virtues of an egalitarian society.

The Barbary frontier in American drama In the final scene of Susanna Haswell Rowson’s Slaves in Algiers (1794), after the Christian captives have assailed the palace, Muley Moloc, the tyrannical Dey of Algiers is forced to accept his defeat and beg for mercy. His moral conversion symbolizes both the displacement of the Oriental paradigm of power, and the triumph of a republican idea of freedom: “I fear,” he says, “from following the steps of my ancestors, I have greatly erred: teach me then, you who so well know how to practice what is right, how to amend my faults” (Rowson 1794, 74). Constant whom the Dey “loaded with chains, thrown into a dungeon,” and separated from his daughter Olivia has this advice to offer: Open your prison doors, give freedom to your people, sink the name of subject in the endearing epithet of fellow-citizen; then you will be loved and reverenced— then you will find, in promoting the happiness of others, you have secured your own. (Rowson 1794, 74) Constant here makes a powerful appeal to a notion of freedom that resonated well with early Americans, which combines physical and moral senses of free will. Incarceration and oppression, by contrast, are metonymies of a despotic power structure that Barbary epitomized in the contemporary American imagination. The reversal of order urged by Constant involves the installment of a democratic structure based on fair government and the advancement of public interest. Inspired by the incidents of captivity of American sailors in Algiers, Rowson deploys the Barbary setting to register her embracement of the ideals of the republic and to ultimately plead for cross-racial and cross-gender tolerance. The liberal 99

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disposition to forgive the Dey his misdeeds and to reintegrate him into the modern body politic is part of an inclusive process of reconciliation that defines Rowson’s political vision. Rebecca, who is held captive in Ben Hassan’s home, awaiting the arrival of her ransom money, discards any idea of revenge when she discovers her captor’s deceit. Her accidental but timely reunion with her long missing British husband, Constant and daughter Olivia at the close of the play has a strong national flavor as it summons up fresh memories of AngloAmerican war and peace. Nevertheless, in endorsing a transnational discourse of reconciliation, Rowson hardly conceals the residues of contention besetting this process in American domestic space. While it has been noted that in her play Rowson refrains from drawing explicit connections between black slavery in America and the captivity of white Americans in North Africa (Montgomery 1994, 622; Dillon 2004, 422), it cannot be lost on readers the resounding implications of the statements made repeatedly by her characters on the universal order of freedom and absolute immorality of slavery. When at the end of the play Sebastian, the Spanish captive, urges for the enslavement of the Dey by law of retaliation, Rebecca promptly declares: By the Christian law, no man should be a slave; it is a word so abject, that, but to speak it dyes the cheek with crimson. Let us assert our own prerogative, to be free ourselves, but let us not throw on another’s neck, the chains we scorn to wear. (Rowson 1794, 73) There is an unmistakable undercurrent of criticism of the social order in these lofty words. It must be remembered that in the late eighteenth century, the questions of race and gender stirred a great deal of controversy and could not be approached in the emphatic terms of posterior eras. On the other hand, the Algerian setting in Rowson’s play strikes the reader as a hollow space emptied from its social and cultural contents. In her prologue Rowson acknowledges that the scenes of the play “are only fictitious- drawn by fancy’s aid” (1794, 78). Unlike James Ellison’s The American Captive (1812) which draws heavily on historical information relating to the American naval war with Tripoli (1801–1805), Rowson’s play reconfigures Algiers in such farcical terms that it bears only a thin resemblance to the contemporary Mediterranean polity. Jeffery Richards has argued that the plot and structure of Slaves in Algiers are influenced by earlier English plays notably Aaron Hill’s Zara, which is itself an adaptation of Voltaire’s Zaire. Notwithstanding her recourse to literary conventions, Rowson, I think, had a definite goal in displaying Algiers as a barren landscape doomed by its overbearing authoritarianism and patriarchy. It is precisely in this exotic world destitute of all vestiges of Christian civilization that a liberal discourse on race and gender could be proclaimed in a vehement tone without provoking censure from the conservative forces. Algiers is transformed into a stage where political dialog can be launched in such foregrounded terms that permit the renegotiation of fixed notions and positions. In placing American female characters Rebecca and Olivia at the center stage and empowering them to speak both as women and as patriotic citizens, Rowson calls into question the boundaries of gender especially when males are deprived of their accrued social privileges and as captives are placed on equal footing with their female compatriots. United in their misfortune, Rowson’s characters are brought to reconfigure their social roles and acquired liberties in the light of an allembracing nationalist narrative. Ultimately, Rowson espouses a conciliatory tone, and in her epilogue she addresses her female audience in these tantalizing words: “Women were born for universal sway; Men to adore, be silent, and obey” (Rowson 1794, 77). 100

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Elizabeth Maddox Dillon in her reading of the play notes that the construction of race occurs within the bounds of a gendered discourse (Dillon 2004, 415–420). The male-female encounter carries strong racial significance and is framed as a futile and incongruous possibility. It must be added that for Rowson, the full realization of this compound alterity is manifested by the Dey who, being a potentate, polygamist, and slaveholder, stands out as the archetypal Oriental male invested with excessive sexual and political power. The rehabilitation of the Dey, therefore, takes place at the sexual as well as the political levels. It involves not only his willingness to embrace democratic principles, but also his conversion to monogamous love and consent to dismantle the harem structure as his final plea to Fitnah to stay insinuates. In Sarah Pogson’s play The Young Carolinians (Pogson 1818) gender is approached as part of a large constellation of identity markers including race, class, religion and nationality.4 Pogson’s female characters, in particular, are socially conservative and entertain no feelings of rivalry toward their male counterparts. Male characters, on the other hand, have little observance for social decorum and are shown to be driven by their sensual impulses. The scenes of the play set simultaneously in Algiers and America are structured around the theme of marriage and its role in generating social coherence and preserving class boundaries (Ford 2006, 116–117). The Algerian context both disrupts and reinforces this social order. When Ellinor and her black companion Margaret are made captives in Algiers, they are unwittingly brought to join their long missing suitors, St Vincent and Zeikel, also held in captivity. Before their reunion is made possible, Ellinor had first to wrench herself free from the covetous desire of her captor Achemt. Pogson resolves this central dilemma in the play once again thorough the medium of marriage. Achmet is forced to wed Selima whose social status proves to be both convenient and enticing to his ambitious designs. In Charleston, where a good part of the play takes place, Ellinor’s sister, Caroline is disheartened by her suitor’s passion for drinking and gambling. Their marriage takes effect only after he has abandoned his excessive lifestyle and made solemn nuptial vows. Marriage, as Ford argues in her article, serves as a filter that maintains class distinctions and consolidates class values. Besides marriage, Pogson also uses race as an apparatus for maintaining social hierarchies. While inter-racial interaction is maintained in the play, racial boundaries are firmly fixed. To cite a notable example, miscegenatic relations both in the American and the Algerian contexts sparked by physical attraction fail to materialize. Neither Margaret nor Ellinor can marry outside their own racial and social categories. Their freedom from captivity is further complemented through reintegration within their respective communities. Another illustration of the social function of race involves the question of slavery in the American society. Pogson addresses slavery from the perspective of a southern apologist. Black characters in her play bear no grudges against their white counterparts and seem altogether contented with their own destinies. Even old Cudjoe accepts his subordinate status and continues to serve his white mistress with infinite loyalty and gratitude: to be sure I slave for true; but poor folks must work every where. Suppose me poor buckra; well, I serve some rich buckra, him pay me; but when Cudjo sick, or lame, or old too much for work, him turn me away; now missess pay me too—for I get plenty good ting for eat, and when I sick, ah! my deary missess give me too much nasty stuff for cure me. (Pogson 1818, 96) Unlike Rowson’s and Pogson’s plays, Ellison’s The American Captive (1812) has no female American characters and frames gender only as a marginal category within a dominantly male 101

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network of power. Deriving a great deal of its lurid detail from popular narratives of US-Tripolitan conflict, the play transforms Barbary into a field where discursive American notions of masculinity and nationhood can be put to the test and reaffirmed. Set against an oppressively authoritarian backdrop, the play celebrates the struggle of American captives to obtain their freedom and restore justice and order to the Tripolitan community. The eventful escape of the American captive, Anderson, constitutes a pivotal moment in the play that triggers the chain of events leading to the downfall of the despotic Bashaw, Abdel Mahadi. Unlike the malleable Dey Muley Moloc in Rowson’s play, the Bashaw emerges as an irredeemable tyrant, usurper, and corsair. As he first makes his appearance on the stage, he indulges in these grave disclosures: I, who for years have pined in blank obscurity, have like the greedy tyger, bursting from his den, o’er leaped the ignominious bound, and pour’d destruction on the wretch, who rashly dar’d to check my will. […] Peace has no charms for me; her train is misery and want! Plunder, alone, can prop our sinking realm: Plunder her coffers fill, and once more give to Tripoli, happiness and fame. Already do my corsairs, mann’d with brave and flinty hearts, beset the coast around; soon shall the waves which lash my circling shores, hear to my port the rich and ponderous prize. (Ellison 1812, 12) In this unabashed self-proclamation, the Bashaw takes pride in having transgressed lawful structures and imposed through force a new order lacking legitimate political and economic foundations. For a republican audience brought up to cherish highbred norms of elective government and free trade, these words have an odious echo. The paradigm of power, which the Bashaw advocates here, represents a violent infringement of American liberties and a threat to their liberal economic and political models. The Bashaw’s anti-American disposition is confirmed when news of the capture of another American ship and enslavement of its crew is announced. This new affront, however, sets the stage for American retribution led by Anderson. An idealized version of the irascible William Eaton,5 Anderson manifests both courage and political will to deliver his fellow captives and reinstate the deposed prince in exile. Using local agency to escape from Tripoli and enlisting the support of the exiled Bashaw, Anderson resurfaces later in the play backed by American naval force to claim the surrender of Abdel Mahdi. The recovery of Tripoli is fraught with massive violence and bloodshed and is achieved only after Anderson kills the ruthless and unrepentant tyrant. In view of the complex vicissitudes of the US-Tripolitan war and the modest peace terms concluded in 1805,6 Ellison’s play seems somewhat extravagant. Beneath the untainted bravura, however, lies a global narrative of democracy cutting across racial and national lines. Ellison’s characters whether of Tripolitan or American descent all share the cause of vanquishing authoritarianism and promoting liberty. Even among American captives, racial boundaries are redefined according to a comprehensive notion of American citizenship. When Jack Binnacle, the American sailor boasts that there were no slaves in his own part of the country, the Tripolitan overseer is incredulous and calls his attention to the thriving Transatlantic slave trade. Feeling the weight of this charge, Binnacle exclaims: “Ohoa! avast there! I’m a Yankee—no slaves with us, why, a black gentleman, in our part of the country, is the very paragon of fashion!” (Ellison 1812, 37). Juba, a black American captive, whom Binnacle appeals to confirm his claim, responds: “O massa, no, no; we brack gentlemen be all free!” (Ellison 1812, 38). It is interesting to note that Juba’s only appearance in the play is used to rebut allegations of existing slavery in America. The defensive posture assumed by Binnacle, in fact, reflects a symptomatic malaise felt almost ubiquitously by contemporary writers. Given the affinities of 102

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slaveholding practices in both Barbary and America, the indictment of North African polities is often imbricated with a weighing sense of irony and self-incrimination. Benilde Montgomery goes as far as claiming that literary reenactments of the Barbary captivity in early American plays entail a bold censure of the entrenched slavery culture at home, and serve as a reminder “that the greatest enemy to America’s institutions is not the enemy without but the more subtle enemy within” (Ellison 1812, 630). This statement is particularly pertinent in reading David Everett’s play, Slaves in Barbary (1817). Unlike the plays of Rowson, Pogson, and Ellison with their varied emphases on gender, class, and national identity, Everett’s short play set in Tunis explores slavery as a global industry. The central scene of the play takes place in the auction market where slaves of diverse origins and backgrounds are paraded before their future Tunisian masters. Everett ingeniously employs the trope of the market to expose the hypocrisy of official discourses proclaiming the sanctity of human rights and the immorality of slavery. The auctioning of slaves also serves as an occasion to subvert social hierarchies and mock the legitimacy of their racial underpinnings. Several critics have noted the singularity of Everett’s play and its strong anti-slavery message (Baepler 1999, 21; Montgomery 1994, 625–926; Marr 2006, 144; Peskin 2009, 80–81). The scene involving the denouncement of a white American slaveholder, Kidnap, by his former black slave, Sharp, is often cited as evidence of Everett’s criticism of the slavery establishment. As a punishment for his brutal treatment of his slaves, Kidnap is in turn reduced to slavery and Sharp made his own overseer as a further sign of disgrace. The reversal of roles and positions, however, is not restricted to Kidnap and Sharp. It involves several other characters including the benevolent Bashaw of Tunis, Hamet who was formerly a captive in Venice and was twice delivered from ignominious bondage by Francisco. Incidentally, it is Francisco’s own brothers Ozro and Amandar who are made slaves in Tunis. Through the clement intervention of Hamet, they are relieved from their cruel master Oran. The revelation of their identities and their intertwined histories occurs at the end of the play. Reciprocating kind treatment to him in the past, Hamet welcomes Francisco as a worthy friend and sets his two brothers free. The figuring of Bashaw Hamet as a savior endowed with noble sentiments marks a rupture with the demonizing portrayal of Barbary potentates so current in contemporary literature. Interestingly enough, the only white American character in the play is depicted as an inveterate slaveholder bereft of any sense of compassion or tolerance. These subversive inscriptions are imbued with political meaning. In reconstituting slavery as a global traffic, Everett not only reconnects slavery practices at home with the captivity of Americans abroad, but also disengages the question of freedom from the confines of nationalist discourse and recast it as a liberal humanist value. The slave market in Tunis serves as a site where alternative forms of democracy unbound by religion, race, or nationality can be implemented. Such a democracy transcends the flawed prescripts of magistrates and manifests itself only through the auspices of benevolent human nature. Everett places ultimate faith in human agency to champion freedom and combat deep-seated racial beliefs. His liberal framing of Barbary, a notoriously undemocratic realm for Americans, carries subtle satirical overtones, for it conveys a genuine concern with the fundamental challenges to American egalitarian pursuits. The subverting of the master-slave order which takes place in Barbary functions as a symbolic trial of the status quo and of its ethical edifice.

Conclusion Such appropriative uses of Barbary were part of a broader dialectic on race articulated in numerous contemporary plays and narratives which endeavored through allegorical motifs to 103

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connect the threads of a global network of servitude and thus make a more compelling argument for its abolition in America. In a freshly independent America still haunted by memories of colonial times and beset by an enduring slaveholding legacy, the Barbary frontier functioned as an elastic site where an amalgam of political concerns, fears, and interests could be accommodated. Within the American dramatic discourse, Barbary’s amorphous landscape provided an ideal framework to approach domestic agenda and highlight their long enveloping shadows for Americans, albeit in a refracted and ambivalent form. Race and gender, in particular, formed the inevitable matrices of a progressive debate on freedom which, though set in a transnational context, had an enduring national aura.

Notes 1 2 3 4

See Baepler (1999) and Allison (2000). This term was used first by Chris Mooney in “The Barbary Analogy” (2001). See, for instance, Kidd (2009) or Waller (2011). The play originally associated with Maria Pinckney has been recently attributed to Sarah Pogson following a recent discovery of an old South Carolina copyrights register; see Kritzer (2005, 3). 5 For a recent account of William Eaton’s campaign and siege of Derna, see Zacks (2005). 6 See “The Barbary Treaties 1786–1816: Treaty of Peace and Amity, Signed at Tripoli June 4, 1805.” The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy. avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/bar1805t.asp.

Bibliography Allison, Robert J. The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815. 1995. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Allison, Robert J., ed., Narratives of Barbary Captivity: Recollections of James Leander Cathcart, Jonathan Cowdery, and William Ray. Chicago: The Lakeside Press/R.R. Donnelley & Sons, 2007. Baepler, Paul M. White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Dillon, Elizabeth M. “Slaves in Algiers: Race, Republican Genealogies, and the Global Stage.” American Literary History 16. 3 (2004): 407–436. Dunne, W. M. P. “Book Review: to the Shores of Tripoli: the Birth of the U.S. Navy and Marines.” Journal of the Early Republic. 11. 4 (1991): 563. Dzurec, David. “A Speedy Release to Our Suffering Captive Brethren in Algiers: Captives, Debate, and Public Opinion in the Early American Republic.” The Historian 71. 4 (2009): 735–756. Ellison, James. The American Captive: or, Siege of Tripoli. Boston: Publisher, 1812. Everett, David. “Slaves in Barbary.” The Columbian Orator. Ed. Caleb Bingham. Boston: Publisher, 1817. 102–118. Ford, Sarah. “Liberty Contained: Sarah Pogson’s The Young Carolinians; Or, Americans in Algiers.” Early American Literature 41. 1 (2006): 109–128. Hill, Aaron, and Calhoun Winton, The Plays of Aaron Hill. New York: Garland, 1981. Jewett, Thomas. “Terrorism in Early America.” Early American Review 4.1 (2002): 1–8. Kidd, Thomas S. American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Global Terrorism. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Kritzer, Amelia H. Plays by Early American Women, 1775–1850. 1995. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. 3. Lambert, Frank. The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World. New York: Hill and Wang, 2005. Leiby, Richard. “Terrorists by another Name: The Barbary Corsairs.” Washington Post, October 15, 2001. London, Joshua E. Victory in Tripoli: How America’s War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Navy and Built a Nation. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishers, 2005. Majid, Anouar. Freedom and Orthodoxy: Islam and Difference in the Post-Andalusian Age. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2004. Marr, Timothy. The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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The Barbary frontier and freedom Montgomery, Benilde. “White Captives, African Slaves: a Drama of Abolition.” Eighteenth-century Studies 27.4 (1994): 615–630. Mooney, Chris. “The Barbary Analogy.” 19 December 2001. http://prospect.org/article/barbary-analogy. Parker, Richard B. Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. Peskin, Lawrence A. Captives and Countrymen: Barbary Slavery and the American Public, 1785–1816. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Pogson, Sarah. “The Young Carolinians; or, Americans in Algiers.” Essays, Religious, Moral, Dramatic & Poetical: Addressed to Youth, and Published for a Benevolent Purpose. Charleston, SC: Archibald E. Miller, 1818. 58–111. Richards, Jeffrey H. Drama, Theater, and Identity in the American New Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Rowson, Susanna Haswell. Slaves in Algiers, or, a Struggle for Freedom. Eds. Jennifer Margulis and Karen Poremski. Acton, MA: Copley Publishing Group, 2000. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books, 1991. Schöpp, Joseph C. “Liberty’s sons and daughter: Susanna Haswell Rowson’s and Royall Tyler’s Algerine captives.” Early America Re-Explored: New Readings in Colonial, Early National, and Antebellum Culture. Eds. Klaus H. Schmidt and Fritz Fleischmann. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. 291–307. Silverstein, Paul A. “The New Barbarians: Piracy and Terrorism on the North African Frontier.” Cr: The New Centennial Review 5. 1 (2005): 179–212. Voltaire. Zaire. Paris: Hatier, 1953. Waller, Nicole. American Encounters with Islam in the Atlantic World. Heidelberg: Winter, 2011. Wheelan, Joseph. Jefferson’s War: America’s First War on Terror, 1801–1805. New York: Carroll and Graft Publishers, 2004. Whipple, A. B. C. To the Shores of Tripoli: The Birth of the U.S. Navy and Marines. New York: Morrow, 1991. Zacks, Richard. The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805. New York: Hyperion, 2005.

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9 STAGES OF CROSSING Transnational Indigenous futures1 Birgit Däwes

Acts of mapping: Cambodia/Kassel At the 2017 documenta in Kassel, Germany, one of the world’s most influential art shows (Mund), more than 5 percent of the artists from around the globe were Indigenous, and even more than 10 percent of the works exhibited dealt in more or less conspicuous ways with Indigenous issues.2 One of these was the immersive, three-channel video installation Preah Kunlong (2017) by Cambodian artist Khvay Samang, co-curated by The Mistake Room, an art space in Los Angeles. In this work, Khvay focuses on the knowledge system of the Chong, one of Cambodia’s and Thailand’s oldest surviving Indigenous groups (Schliesinger 2017, 170). The film segments of his installation, projected on to two diagonally opposing screens, show individual performers wearing animal masks made of woven vines. Framed in long shots or closeup shots, each masked performer moves around the vast rainforest landscape of the Areng Valley in Cambodia’s southwestern province of Koh Kong.3 This set-up represents a particular epistemological framework, since for the Chong, as curator Hendrik Folkerts reminds viewers in the catalogue, “knowledge is conveyed through speech and the body, which rather point to spiritual ecology and collectivity” (Folkerts 2017). Even though Khvay “embedded himself” (Folkerts 2017) in the Chong community of Koh Kong for one year during his research, the result is not a documentary film: Viewers do not see actual ceremonies but instead a performance designed by the artist, a dancer, and a choreographer in order to foreground the ways in which, for the Chong, the landscape, its non-human animals, and the human body are inseparably interlinked. Wearing animal masks of a bird, of a Siamese crocodile, or of an elephant, the dancers perform “the process by which the Chong people mark the edges of their land by enacting the movements of animals which inhabit the landscape” (Allen 2017). At an obvious level, this performative process of mapping ties in with the redrawing of geopolitical boundaries that has been at the core of the “transnational turn,” as summarized by Shelley Fisher Fishkin in her seminal address of 2004. Fishkin described “the field of American studies” as “an increasingly important site of knowledge marked by a very different set of assumptions—a place where borders both within and outside the nation are interrogated and studied, rather than reified and reinforced” (Fishkin 2005, 20). At the same time, whereas borders between nations became increasingly criticized as generative frameworks of political analysis, the importance of land, sovereignty and nationhood was not diminished for 106

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Native North Americans. Chadwick Allen writes that Native American Studies have been hesitant to adopt the new methodology and research agenda of the transnational turn because many scholars “question whether the ‘nation’ in ‘transnational’ can ever mean other than the settler nation-state” (Allen 2014, 110). Furthermore, as Jodi A. Byrd warns, “in collapsing Indigenous Peoples into the racial formations of national belongings, the transnational turns of the past few decades continued to produce the colonial histories of Indigenous dispossession as the condition of possibility for resisting the nation-state in the first place” (Byrd 2017, 176). For Indigenous Americans, therefore, the “transnational turn” needs to be revised along different lines of inquiry, and remodeled by separate architectural rules. I would like to use Khvay Samang’s video installation as a symbolic preface and structural outline for my approach, since it establishes three pillars that could be used for such a distinct architecture of Indigenous American transnationalism, especially in the context of drama and performance. First, and most obviously, it invokes the spatial and geopolitical dimensions of transnationalism by its engagement with boundaries and by the backgrounds of its production. In this context, Preah Kunlong can be highlighted as the work of an artist from Cambodia invested in an Indigenous agenda, presented in Greece and Germany, co-curated by a Dutch art historian and a US American museum. At a deeper level, the work also thematically links the Chong people’s performative engagement with boundaries in a specific locale in Cambodia to global concerns of identity, indigeneity, and environmental politics, underlining Shari Huhndorf’s dictum that “[w]hile the transnational indigenous movement is largely bound to local, even national, concerns, it brings to the fore issues that extend beyond the tribal” (Huhndorf 2009, 13). Second, in its repetitions, loops, and cohesive patterns projected onto two neighboring screens, the 25-minute installation calls attention to a dimension that has been largely overlooked in discussions of the transnational turn: “the status of time,” as Fredric Jameson calls it elsewhere, “in a regime of spatiality” ( Jameson 2015, 120). Considering the colonial practice of displacing Indigenous cultures to a distant past, which frames them within what Louis Owens termed “ethnostalgia” (Owens 1992, 12), and which thus denies them “a syncretic, dynamic, adaptive identity” in a contemporary and future world (Owens 1992, 12), a revision of temporality is of the essence for an Indigenous concept of transnationalism. Third and finally, the concept of border crossing that is central to the transnational turn not only concerns geographical perimeters, but—as Khvay’s use of animal masks and his emphasis on Chong cosmology demonstrates—it crucially includes the transcendence of epistemological boundaries and an acknowledgement of alternative systems of knowledge. As Hendrik Folkerts writes in the exhibition catalogue, “the practice of cartography is inextricably connected with militarist and colonial histories. These histories dictate that to map land is to own it, that to draw the lines that signify borders, frontiers, and state lines is to align the future terms of power” (Folkerts 2017). In Khvay’s work, by contrast, the performative practice of mapping foregrounds the Chong people’s respect for the landscape and its non-human inhabitants. In its presentation of masked performers, and by its layerings within different media (the immersive projection of a filmed version of the performance of ceremonial movements), Preah Kunlong also draws attention to the performative nature of (national/transnational or local/global) identities and their embeddedness within a global, transnational, and “trans-indigenous” (Allen 2012, xiv) web of connections. It has by now become something of a commonplace to state that Native North American genres have always been in and of themselves transnational through their generative conditions among the 567 federally recognized Native American nations in the US and 617 First Nations in Canada (Norris, Statistics Canada). As Scott Richard Lyons summarizes:

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From global networks of production, circulation, and patronage that enabled Native American writers to emerge over two centuries ago, to the close involvement of cosmopolitan educational societies and universities, and finally to the importance of cross-cultural collaboration, transatlantic travel, and aesthetics (e.g. modernism) that respect no one’s imagined borders, Native American literature has always been […] a global enterprise. (Lyons 2017, 13) This is particularly true for Native North American drama, which has seen increasing numbers of international productions (of works by playwrights such as Tomson Highway or E. Donald Two-Rivers), tours (by theater groups such as Spiderwoman Theater or Debajehmujig), and transnational agendas and themes in festivals such as the Native Voices Festival of New Plays at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, whose mission it is “to develo[p] and produc[e] new works for the stage by Native American, Alaska Native, and First Nations playwrights” (Autry Museum of the American West 2017), or Native Earth Performing Arts’ Caminos, which presents “new works-in-progress from local Pan-American, Indigenous, and Latinx artists” (Native Earth Performing Arts 2017). Yet in addition to these obvious levels of geopolitical inquiry, performative work by Indigenous North American artists innovatively engages with dimensions of temporality and historicity and develops alternative modes of knowledge into an aesthetics of structural and epistemological border crossing. In the following, therefore, I will exemplarily use Drew Hayden Taylor’s Crees in the Caribbean (FP 2015, published in 2017), Tomson Highway’s The (Post)Mistress (FP 2011, published in 2013), Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Manahatta (FP 2014), and Cliff Cardinal’s Huff (FP 2015, published in 2017) to explore those dimensions in order to sketch some of the methodological cornerstones of transnational Indigenous Studies and to make a case for a more inclusive terminology of the transnational within American Studies.

“We put the earth back together”: Geopolitical borders and transnational Indigenous trajectories In Drew Hayden Taylor’s 2017 tragicomedy, Crees in the Caribbean, an elderly Cree couple, Evangeline and Cecil Poundmaker, has embarked on a vacation to the eastern coast of Mexico in order to celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary. Since this is their first time away from their home in Saskatchewan (except for those five hours that Cecil spent in Montana once (Taylor 2017, 11)), their adaptation to the new environment is a little uneven: “Who cares about Mexico?” Cecil asks. “I don’t like their food. I don’t drink tequila anymore. We got beaches back home” (Taylor 2017, 7). While Cecil’s negative attitude turns out to have its origin in his fear of a fatal disease, Evie wants to “try new things” (Taylor 2017, 23) and embraces cultural diversity. Her enthusiasm for local food, cultural immersion and sightseeing is constantly curbed by Cecil (“If you want to look at an ancient, broken-down Indian ruin, we can go visit your cousin” [Taylor 2017, 31]), but she decides to be independent and even befriends the hotel’s maid Manuela, whose family of two baby brothers, parents and grandparents “depends on [her] working” (Taylor 2017, 53) since her father is sick. The women bond over Manuela’s pregnancy, and Evie offers her advice and consolation on the fact that the baby’s father, Robert, does not want to make a commitment. It turns out that Manuela is also part Indigenous, and the more Cecil learns about her, the more he sympathizes. In the end, after agreeing to visit her village and enjoying “chicken covered in chocolate” (Taylor 2017, 76), he even uses his skills as a former boxer to intimidate Robert and make him 108

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accept his responsibility. When Evie wonders how he achieved this goal, Cecil tells her about the “Aboriginal Alliance”: I told him how all the Native people in North America have a secret alliance where we pass on information to each other and call on our Indian brothers in other countries to keep an eye on other people. Maybe deal out some justice if necessary. Sort of a secret society. I told them I was actually here for secret meetings with some of the local tribes. He seemed properly impressed. (Taylor 2017, 93) This transnational network of Indigenous people, albeit fictitious, epitomizes a larger trend towards trans-Indigenous solidarity that was politically institutionalized in 2000 in the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and that also includes organizations such as the World Council of Indigenous Peoples and the International Indian Treaty Council (Sissons 2009, 526). Along these same lines, the bond between the Cree couple and the Mexican hotel maid as well as the “Aboriginal Alliance” exemplify the “theories of cosmopolitanism and postnational conceptions of ‘global’ or ‘planetary’ citizenship” that John Carlos Rowe and Alfred Hornung, for instance, see at the heart of the transnational turn (see Rowe 2017; Hornung 2005, 70). Whereas these early works in transnational theory often overlooked the particular conditions of Indigenous Americans within a settler-colonial state, more recent criticism has taken on the challenge of rewriting the transnational turn from an Indigenous perspective (see Huhndorf 2009; Justice 2010, 2011; Allen 2012; Huang et al. 2012; Krupat 2013). This rewriting has been primarily concerned with the distinctions between national and transnational from the point of view of political sovereignty: “It is important to note,” Daniel Heath Justice writes, “that indigeneity—the constitutive lived relationship and kinship of a people to a particular land, its histories, and its other-than-human inhabitants—is, in many ways, inextricable from definitions of the transnational, even though both categories are often assumed to be oppositional” (Justice 2010, 171). At the same time, the discussion of nationhood is inseparable from the concerns of social and cultural identity, not only along the conventional, binary local/ global divide, but also within the highly differentiated local conditions of contemporary life. In her study on urban Indigenous communities entitled Native Hubs, for instance, Renya K. Ramirez uses the term “transnationalism to highlight that many Native peoples remain connected to tribal nations, even while living away from reservations, rancherías, villages, or pueblos” (Ramirez 2007, 13). Indigenous transnationalism thus acknowledges the multiple affiliations, loyalties, communities, and living conditions that intersect and overlap in political, social, and cultural research arenas. In precisely this sense, Tomson Highway’s play The (Post)Mistress (Highway 2013), is structured by a wide variety of letters from Rio de Janeiro, New Orleans, Montreal, Vald’Or (Quebec), Lake Menard (Ontario), Toronto, Buenos Aires, Saskatoon (Saskatchewan), and Ottawa, in addition to the two fictitious towns of “Lovely” and—most tellingly— “Complexity” (Highway 2013, 3). The play’s protagonist, Marie-Louise Painchaud, is a francophone woman with Cree heritage who has been working at the post office—and thus at one of the emblematic switch points of border-crossing communication—for 31 years (Highway 2013, 8). Her programmatic array of love stories across the hemisphere promotes transnational and intercultural alliances without any diminution of tribal specificity: large parts of the play (including some of Highway’s signature songs) are performed in Cree, partly “without surtitle translations” (Highway 2013, 4) and thus a powerful endorsement of cultural sovereignty. Whereas Taylor’s Crees in the Caribbean also brims with cultural stereotypes 109

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to reinforce its humorous effects, and Highway’s Marie-Louise Painchaud is fascinated at the thought that “it’s so hot down there in Rio de Janeiro that they wear nothing but dental floss” (Highway 2013, 4), both plays promote what Joseph Bauerkemper has termed a “complementary, rather than oppositional, configuration of nationalism and transnationalism” (Bauerkemper 2014, 396). For this configuration, Bauerkemper suggests to use the term “trans/nationalism,” with the slash indicating “both the sovereign integrity of Indigenous nations and the relations that move between and across them” (Bauerkemper 2014, 396)—a theme that runs through a large number of contemporary Native North American plays, from Spiderwoman Theater’s Power Pipes (Spiderwoman Theater 1993)—in which the protagonists emphasize that they “put the earth back together” (Spiderwoman Theater 1993, 156)—to Donna-Michelle St. Bernard’s (2011) Gas Girls, and from Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl’s (1998) The Story of Susanna to The Turtle Gals’ (2002) Scrubbing Project.

“Intergenerational continuity and community”: Borders of time In their foreword to Spiderwoman Theater’s 2007 play Persistence of Memory, the authors state that “[i]t is important to build and support a generational memory”: Every day we fight to remember who we are, to hold on to the memories of our great-great-grandparents and the memories of their children, and to keep them fresh in our minds. […] It is important to be home again and connect our stories of the past to our future. Our future is the generations who will take their stories out into the world of the new millennium and who will create a new legacy for their future generations. (Spiderwoman Theater 1993, 42) This quote not only highlights trans-historic memory as a key element of Native North American Theater, but it foregrounds a connecting arch that has been largely absent from both nonIndigenous and Indigenous discussions of transnationalism: the correlation, especially in Indigenous American cultures, between space and time. “Far more than a geographic location,” Jaye Darby writes, “home is the timeless source of spirituality, the site where intergenerational continuity and community nurture the continuance of traditions and sacred responsibilities” (Darby 2010, 55, emphasis added). Many Native North American plays underline this connection: LeAnne Howe’s and Roxy Gordon’s (1993) Indian Radio Days presents a historical tour of European and Native American relations, in Bruce King’s (1994) Evening at the Warbonnet, the characters work their way through twentieth-century history in a mythical set-up that becomes timeless, and The Triple Truth by the Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble (2003) covers the time from pre-contact America to 9/11 (Nolan 2015, 42–43), to name but three examples. Mary Kathryn Nagle’s (2014) Manahatta particularly focuses on the interface between spatial and temporal dimensions of transnationalism. It tells the story of Jane Snake, a young Lenape woman from Oklahoma, who returns to her ancestral homelands in Manhattan to pursue a career in investment banking. Between these two places, she has to deal both with the reverberations of the 2008 global financial crisis at Lehman Brothers and with a number of family conflicts in Anadarko, OK. Structurally reflecting the multiple sites of her conflictedness, the experience of Jane’s family is closely intertwined with the historical purchase of Manhattan by the Dutch in 1626 and its devastating consequences for the Lenape. The plot accordingly shifts back and forth between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries, with fluid boundaries between the time levels: When Jane is learning her trade of selling investment packages on 110

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Wall Street, a parallel scene shows Peter Minuit, the historical governor of the Dutch West India Company, trading beaver pelts and guns with Lenape leaders Tamanend and Se-ket-tumay-qua. Following the revisionist historical agenda that is characteristic for contemporary transnational and trans-Indigenous perspectives, the scene is underscored by critiques of imperialism and capitalism when Minuit envisions the future of the piece of land he believes he just purchased: “Now picture the southern tip of Manahatta, full of boats. From all over the world. Sweden. Britain. Russia. France—and here they have come because they want to trade furs. Picture us, the fur trade capital of the world. The price of fur is sky rocketing, and this is where the world comes to get it. And only we have it” (Nagle 2014, 43). Exposing the greed behind Minuit’s illegitimate act of dispossession, this blending of spatial and temporal categories into a historical continuum acknowledges the necessity to “connect our stories of the past to our future,” as Spiderwoman Theater summarize their goal. Temporal boundaries are not only coded as permeable, they are dissolved to the point of indistinction in the interest of a larger, spatiotemporal continuity. On the level of form, this effect is reinforced by the fact that all actors play characters on both time levels, and the transitions between the seventeenth and the twenty-first centuries are smoothly effected by semantic themes or material objects rather than by a separation of scenes. Jane’s historical interconnectedness, for instance, is symbolized by the traditional wampum necklace that she receives from her father: Robert tells her that “[w]hen your grandma, your great-great-greathowever many greats grandma made this necklace, wampum meant something very special to our people. To the Dutch, it seemed as though it was a form of currency. But it was more than that. […] Wampum was sacred, and it was a sign of respect” (Nagle 2014, 134). In the parallel scene from the seventeenth century, the audience learns the exact history of this necklace when Lenape leader Tamanend gives it to his daughter: “Your mother made this necklace, just before you were born. Made it from shells she collected right here, on this shoreline. I give it to you now, so that you can carry it with you. And someday, when your daughter is born, you will give it to her. And when she has a daughter, she will give it to her daughter” (Nagle 2014, 125). As the necklace demonstrates, geographical places and temporal categories are merely transitory constructions in a larger continuity of “generational memory” (Spiderwoman Theater 2009, 42). On the one hand, the continuity between the different time levels underlines the close ties between contemporary characters and their ancestors in the interest of national/tribal sovereignty and the assertion of historical heritage and ownership. On the other hand, when Jane moves to New York and unwittingly returns the wampum necklace to its place of origin, the play embraces a larger transnational logic that goes beyond any binary or linear concept of nationhood or time. Like countless other works by contemporary Native North American playwrights (including Hanay Geiogamah, Floyd Favel, Margo Kane, Yvette Nolan, or Marie Clements), Manahatta follows a cyclical structure (see Däwes 2007, 428–430) to the effect of deconstructing any sense of linear history. In its transnational and trans-historic conceptualization of “home,” it thus powerfully demonstrates the inseparability of the temporal dimension from discussions of space or nation.

Stages of involvement: Indigenous knowledges and border-crossing aesthetics At the end of Tomson Highway’s play The (Post)Mistress, we learn that Marie-Louise’s letters did not merely cross national boundaries on their way from sender to addressee: It turns out that she talks to us from the afterlife, since she “died ten months ago, from breast cancer” 111

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(Highway 2013, 63). “[N]ow that I’m dead,” she tells us, “I work in this great big post office up here in the sky handling mail between the dead and the living, letters they send to each other through their dreams” (Highway 2013, 64). In an Indigenous revision of transnationalism, boundaries of space and time are evidently not the only ones crossed: It is equally important to open the perimeters of cosmology, mythology, and knowledge. As Yvette Nolan writes in her 2015 survey of First Nations drama, “[m]edicine, in my community, is not about curing, not even really about healing. Medicine is about connection, about health. […] The Medicine of the Wheel is that it endeavours to teach us to apprehend the interconnectedness of all things” (Nolan 2015, 1). This “interconnectedness of all things” is central to Native North American theater and other modes of artistic expression, and it requires any redefinition of the “trans/national” from an Indigenous point of view to not only take into account Indigenous epistemologies and Indigenous knowledge, but to emerge from their very center. In addition to their spatial, geopolitical, and temporal boundaries, many Native North American plays accordingly perforate borderlines between individuals and communities, life and death, history and mythology, as well as art and life (or diegetic and extradiegetic spaces). Cliff Cardinal’s (2015) award-winning monodrama Huff, which toured to London, England, in June 2017, fundamentally expands this border-crossing aesthetic into metaphysical, mythical, and meta-dramatic realms. Huff’s protagonist Wind, who is—like all 21 characters—played by Cardinal himself, unravels the story of his dysfunctional family, his mother’s suicide, the consequences of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, domestic violence as well as physical and sexual abuse. Set on a nameless reserve somewhere in North America, the story generically deplores the consequences of colonialism, racism, and poverty in First Nations communities. Wind and his younger brother Huff not only suffer from violence within their home, but they are also “products of the reserve school system” (Cardinal 2015, 29) where they encounter discrimination instead of empathy and support. They escape into drug abuse (the eponymous “gas-huffing” [Cardinal 2015, 29]), fictional stories, and Huff’s sense of optimism: Huff believes that, as a “sacred gift from creator,” he is able to blow happiness into people (Cardinal 2015, 7). After the terrifying climax of the play, when their cruel older brother Charles rapes Huff, this gift is lost, and the youngest child follows their mother’s path and hangs himself. In this intense, episodic, and time-shifting plot, Wind and Huff epitomize by their names the various dimensions of air in motion, including their breathing, their inhaling of chemicals, Huff’s technique of blowing “that feeling you get when you laugh” (Cardinal 2015, 7) into others, the natural gust of wind that causes them to accidentally burn down a motel (Cardinal 2015, 14–15), and the fatal lack of breath in the choking of Huff and their mother, as well as Wind’s multiple suicide attempts. Just as air easily and invisibly pervades the performative space, the protagonist’s story interlaces material and mythological worlds. The boys’ dog Angelina as well as Skunk, the animal “messenger” who “show[s] your shame” (Cardinal 2015, 19), are talking characters, and the shape-shifting and border crossing figure of the trickster plays a central part, as Wind tells the audience: He turns back to the audience. Trickster. See for my people “Trickster” is a real thing. Ask anyone’s Kohkum [Cree for “your grandmother”]. If you listen, you can hear the lessons. And through the generations we’ve heard the lessons so many times, we came up with a word for it: Trickster. 112

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That one drink too many before the drive home: Trickster. […] That the very story that brought you into the darkness is the only one that can lead you back to the light: Trickster. (Cardinal 2015, 2–3) As this last metafictional line illustrates, Trickster also dismantles the fourth wall, and in addition to the smooth transitions between time levels and natural/supernatural domains that characterize a majority of contemporary Native plays, Cliff Cardinal accordingly challenges the boundary between reality and fiction itself. In the opening scene of the play, he enters the stage with a plastic bag around his head, “duct taped below his throat to create an airtight seal” (Cardinal 2015, 1). Greeting the audience members as “imaginary friends” and as “a hallucination brought on by [my] brain screaming out for oxygen,” he tells them that “[t]his is a suicide attempt. I say ‘attempt’ but it’s looking pretty good. I should know. I’ve done this before” (Cardinal 2015, 1). Adding information on death by anoxia, and promising that “[y]our normal show will be on again soon. This isn’t life and death. Not for you” (Cardinal 2015, 1), Wind not only blurs the line between the diegetic and extradiegetic spaces, but he makes that line the essential theme and target of his performance. As the actor visibly struggles for air, even “fall[ing] to the floor trying to get the bag off” (Cardinal 2015, 2), audiences accustomed to illusory experiences within a theatrical space will wonder whether the plastic bag will be punctured or removed soon within the fictional realm of the stage. However, as this is not happening, an intervention becomes indispensable; at the latest when Wind addresses an audience member, asking “Hey can you get this off me? Seriously. This isn’t a metaphor. If you don’t help me I’ll suffocate right here” (Cardinal 2015, 2). Radically breaking down the fourth wall between stage and auditorium, the actor’s and the character’s bodies are fused in an actual emergency that requires the audience to take responsibility, and to interfere, beyond any cultural convention, on an intersubjective human basis. This is when the aesthetics of boundary crossing also takes on an ethical dimension: not only do the play’s setup and cyclical structure dissolve linear notions of time and foreground Indigenous cosmology, but the simultaneous dismantling of the institutional boundary between stage and audience (and thus the boundaries that separate human beings by cultural codes) remind us of the ethical necessities at the heart of “‘planetary’ citizenship” (Rowe 2017). Seen in this light, Cliff Cardinal’s Huff is easily the most radically trans/ national of the plays discussed above, even though it never mentions either national or transnational concerns.

Staging trans/national futures According to the Anishinaabe prophecy of the Seven Fires, the era we currently live in is “the time of the seventh fire, a time when there will be a rebirth of the Anishinaabe nations and a re-kindling of the sacred fire” (Nolan 2015, 117). As Yvette Nolan explains, the “eighth fire is an extension of the prophecies, a suggestion and a wish that now is the time for the Indigenous people and the settler communities to work together to achieve justice, to live together in a good way” (Nolan 2015, 117). It may, at first glance, seem a far stretch from the performative mapping practices of the Chong people in Cambodia to an Indigenous reconceptualization of the term “transnational” along categories of time, epistemology, and ethical commitment. At an obvious level, contemporary Native North American theater and drama do not—for the most part at least—explicitly engage with the theoretical debate of the “transnational turn.” Yet if we take into account the “growing understanding in critical circles that literary nationalism and cosmopolitanism are—or can be—complementary 113

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approaches” (Justice 2011, 338), and if we read this in correlation with Yvette Nolan’s claim that “Indigenous performance offers one of the most generative means for Indigenous people and Canadians to explore their shared history and work towards some kind of conciliation” (Nolan 2015, 19), the genre does indeed provide the coordinates to remap the field of Indigenous American Studies along transnational lines. On this alternative map, recent works by playwrights such as Tomson Highway, Drew Hayden Taylor, Mary Kathryn Nagle, or Cliff Cardinal highlight arenas of territory (both national and transnational) in the context of their interconnections with sovereignty, history, and futurity, as well as their embeddedness within Indigenous cosmologies and aesthetic designs. They thus substantially contribute to Transnational American Studies, illustrating that this arena of research is and remains, as Nina Morgan has it, “by method, approach, and strategy non-monolithic, even ‘anti’-monolithic” (Morgan 2016, 2), while simultaneously envisioning distinct forms of human interaction on a global map of commitment. In a field of tension between local/national and global/cosmopolitan forces, of “tribal internationalism” (Huhndorf 2009, 140), and of a dedicated “Indigenous scholarship of the future, when Indigenous identities will be only more and not less diverse and complex” (Allen 2012, xxxiii), these performances show that rather than an irreconcilable contradiction, transnationalism is a conditio sine qua non of Indigenous American Studies. Within this arena, the genre of Indigenous American drama may be seen as a road map—much in the Chong people’s sense of the word—for a future-oriented, inclusive understanding of trans/national co-existence, in spatial, temporal, and epistemological terms.

Notes 1 I would like to express my particular gratitude to Mary Kathryn Nagle and Cliff Cardinal for providing me with the manuscripts of their work at a time when these plays had or have not been published yet. I would also like to respectfully acknowledge Native Earth Performing Arts’s production of Cliff Cardinal’s Huff at Aki Studio in Toronto in October 2015, which was the core inspiration for my reconceptualization of Indigenous transnationalism. 2 In 2017, these included, for instance, Rebecca Belmore, Beau Dick, Dale Harding, Gordon Hookey, Keviselie (Hans Ragnar Mathisen), Britta Marakatt-Labba, Joar Nango, Nathan Pohio, and Abel Rodríguez. The art exhibition has been open to the public since 1955. Since 1972, the exhibition has been taking place every five years for 100 days each. In 2012, the documenta 13 was visited by nearly one million people; it presents, according to Heike Mund, “the latest trends in the art world and is a lab for artistic experimentation.” In 2017, the exhibit was displayed in two locations, in Athens and Kassel; and it continues to be a visible site of negotiation for issues of politics, transnationalism, decolonialism, even though it has not entirely shaken off its root structures of hegemonic, Eurocentric art history (Hoffmann 2013, 124–25). 3 For details on the geographical contexts and the making of the installation, see Folkerts (2017).

Bibliography Allen, Chadwick. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Allen, Chadwick. “A Transnational Native American Studies? Why Not Studies That Are Trans-Indigenous?” Aspects of Transnational and Indigenous Cultures. Eds. Hsinya Huang and Clara Shu-Chun Chang. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2014. 91–112. Allen, Michele. “Documenta 14: 30 Recommendations from 10 Artists.” a-n news: The Artists Information Company. 13 June 2017. Autry Museum of the American West. “About Native Voices.” 2017. Bauerkemper, Joseph. “Indigenous Trans/Nationalism and the Ethics of Theory in Native Literary Studies.” The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature. Eds. James H. Cox and Daniel Heath Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 395–408.

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Stages of crossing Byrd, Jodi A. “American Indian Transnationalisms.” The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature. Ed. Yogita Goyal. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 174–189. Cardinal, Cliff. “Huff.” 2015. Däwes, Birgit. Native North American Theater in a Global Age: Sites of Identity Construction and Transdifference. Heidelberg: Winter, 2007. Darby, Jaye. “Into the Sacred Circle: Homecomings in Native Women’s Contemporary Performance.” American Indian Performing Arts: Critical Directions. Eds. Hanay Geiogamah and Jaye T. Darby. Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2010. 55–77. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies - Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004.” American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 17–57. Folkerts, Hendrik. “Khvay Samnang.” Documenta 14: Daybook. Eds. Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymcyk. New York: Prestel, 2017. Highway, Tomson. The (Post)Mistress. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2013. Hoffmann, Katja. Ausstellungen als Wissensordnungen: Zur Transformation des Kunstbegriffs auf der documenta 11. Bielefeld: transcript, 2013 Hornung, Alfred. “Transnational American Studies: Response to the Presidential Address.” American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 67–73. Huang, Hsinya, Philip Deloria, Laura Furlan, and John Gamber. “Charting Transnational Native American Studies.” The Journal of Transnational American Studies 4.1 (2012): 1–15. Huhndorf, Shari. Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. Jameson, Fredric. “The Aesthetics of Singularity.” New Left Review 92 (March 2015): 101–132. Justice, Daniel Heath. “Currents of Trans/national Criticism in Indigenous Literary Studies.” American Indian Quarterly 35. 3 (Summer 2011): 334–352. Justice, Daniel Heath. “‘To Look Upon Thousands’: Cherokee Transnationalism, at Home and Abroad.” The New Centennial Review 10.1 (2010): 169–178. Krupat, Arnold. “Nationalism, Transnationalism, Trans-Indigenism, Cosmopolitanism: Four Perspectives on Native American Literatures.” Journal of Ethnic American Literature 3 (2013): 5–63. Lyons, Scott Richard. “Introduction: Globalizing the World.” The World, the Text, and the Indian: Global Dimensions of Native American Literature. Ed. Scott Richard Lyons. Albany: SUNY Press, 2017. 1–16. Morgan, Nina. “A Community of Thought: Connecting with Transnational American Studies.” Journal of Transnational American Studies 7.1 (2016): 1–8. Mund, Heike. “The Documenta in Kassel.” DW: Deutsche Welle. September 16, 2015. Nagle, Mary Kathryn. “Manahatta.” Unpublished Playscript, 2012. Native Earth Performing Arts. “Caminos 2017: Performing Intersections.” 2017. Nolan, Yvette. Medicine Shows: Indigenous Performance Culture. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2015. Norris, Tina, et al. “The American Indian and Alaska Native Population: 2010.” 2010 Census Briefs. January 2012. Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Ramirez, Renya. Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Rowe, John Carlos. “Transnationalism and American Studies.” Encyclopedia of American Studies. Ed. Simon J. Bronner. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Schliesinger, Joachim. The Chong People: A Pearic-Speaking Group of Southeastern Thailand and Their Kin in the Region. Bangkok: White Elephant Press, 2017. Schliesinger, Joachim. “Saving the Areng Valley.” Mother Nature Cambodia. 2017. Sissons, Jeffrey. “Indigenous Networks.” The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History: From the Mid-19th Century to the Present Day. Eds. Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 526–528. Spiderwoman Theater. “Persistence of Memory.” Performing Worlds Into Being: Native American Women’s Theater. Ed. Ann Elizabeth Armstrong et al. Oxford, OH: Miami University Press, 2009. 42–56. Spiderwoman Theater. “Power Pipes.” Seventh Generation: An Anthology of Native American Plays. Ed. Mimi Gisolfi D’Aponte. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993. 149–195. Statistics Canada. “Aboriginal Peoples in Canada: First Nations People, Métis and Inuit.” Statistics Canada, September 15, 2016. Taylor, Drew Hayden. Crees in the Caribbean. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2017.

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10 THE ASSEMBLING OF TRANSINDIGÈNITUDE THROUGH INTERNATIONAL CIRCUITS OF POETRY Gloria E. Chacón

Introduction This chapter delineates in broad strokes the groundwork that has gained momentum in key countries of Abiayala1 and seeks to frame an understanding of indigeneity that is specifically a “trans-indigènitude,” one that is performed and voiced through the multilingualism and transnationalism of a poetic project through literary festivals taking place within and across intersectional, native communities and their concerns. I discuss how these literary gatherings participate in the making of trans-indigènitude, and I contemplate their potential contribution and dialogue with the field of Transnational American Studies, not to proposition their absorption nor integration but rather to acknowledge a field that is at once grounded in local and transnational native land networks with political commitments that are not necessarily translatable in the larger field of American Studies. James Clifford’s useful analogy between negritude and indigènitude captures the sense of formation among the rise of indigenous poets across spatial geographies. He clarifies that “[l]ike negritude, indigènitude is a vision of liberation and cultural difference that challenges, or at least redirects, the modernizing agendas of nation-states and transnational capitalism” (Clifford 2013, l6). In this dynamic, indigenous communities reject incorporation into an undifferentiated globalization, but also make use of it to expand their cultural and political projects. Clifford continues defining indigènitude further as one “performed at the United Nations and the International Labor Organization, at arts and cultural festivals, at political events, and in many informal travels and contacts” (Clifford 2013, l6). In sum, he notes that indigènitude is not so much an ideology as it is a weaving of sources and political undertakings, and I would add, making literary interventions. He characterizes it as operating within multiple scales that include local practices where among the most central are maintaining kinship, language renewal, protection of sacred sites, as well as national agendas such as Hawai’ian sovereignty, Mayan politics in Guatemala, Maori mobilizations in Aotearoa/New Zealand. And, in conversation with all of these, Clifford notes, is the transnational activism, with the most visible being the “Red Power” movement from the global sixties, or the variegated contemporary social movements focused 116

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on cultural identity, land and resources—all of which also tend to ally with NGO’s (Clifford 2013, l6). Indigènitude then is both local and global. Chadwick Allen’s foundational text, Trans-Indigenous, 2 proposes that “trans” circumvents some of the issues with comparative or local/global divides among other pesky problems. He writes: The point is not to displace a necessary, invigorating study of specific traditions and contexts but rather to complement these by augmenting and expanding broader, globally indigenous fields of inquiry. The point is to invite specific studies into different kinds of conversations, and to acknowledge the mobility in multiple interactions of indigenous peoples, cultures, histories, and texts. Similar to terms like translation, transnational, and transform, trans-indigenous may be able to bear the complex, contingent asymmetry in the potential risks of unequal encounters borne by the preposition across … At this moment in the development of global indigenous literary studies primarily in English, trans seems the best choice. (Allen 2012, xiv–xv) By placing “trans” and “indigènitude ” together to form “trans-indigènitude,” this chapter accents the developments around literary networks that ground the local and the global, Indigenous nationalism and transnationalism, multilingualism, among other characteristics. Clifford and Allen’s works have helped me frame the multiple international and transnational manoeuvres involved in the formation of trans-indigènitude through poetry. Chadwick Allen’s emphasis of English aside, trans-indigenous begins the work of thinking across Indigenous nations, languages, and settler divides. The aim of this chapter is to grasp trans-indigènitude as an analytic category in what may be described as a parallel formation to Transnational American Studies. Key to the rest of the discussion, then, is an acknowledgement of the important work that Native American scholars have offered in advocating for a nationalist, separatist, or tribe-specific literary study. Prominent Native American scholars remain skeptical of transnational discourse. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack, for example, all advocate for a nationalist literary discourse. Robert Warrior (Osage), a prominent scholar in Native American and Indigenous Studies, contends that Native American scholars have tended to resist transnational discourse due to its connection to postcolonial studies (Warrior 2009, 122). Warrior notes that transnational proponents are less interested in the transnationalism produced by colonialism within its political lines (Warrior 2009, l23). “Our nationalism,” Warrior emphasizes “is born out of native transnationalism, the flow and exchange of ideas and politics across our respective nations’ borders” (Warrior 2009, 125). While this may sound like a paradox to some scholars in American Studies, Indigenous political identities are understood as tied to local and global circuits. As Warrior reiterates: [T]he discourse on nationalism remains important to Native American literary studies because it remains the domestic and international language in which Native struggle is waged and remains a primary vehicle for fueling Indigenous imaginations. Because Native peoples continue to have political status as nations, at least in the US and Canada, we as scholars remain committed to framing and developing our work as members of our respective nations. (Warrior 2009, l26) 117

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A nationalist position remains paramount to writers and other intellectuals as they contest hegemonic ideas about literacy, text, periodization, and language. Equally important is the work by Indigenous academics who see transnationalism (i.e., across tribes/native nations) as fundamental to framing and understanding Indigenous literatures. Chadwick Allen and Ellen McGlennen, who have ties to but not citizenship in Indigenous nations, turn to the transnational to raise key issues that are not addressed in Native American nationalist literary criticism, such as urban subjectivities, queer identities, and disenrollment (among many others) facing contemporary communities in the United States who do not always have citizenship in a Native nation. While the latter critics do not reject tribal specificity in their analysis, they perceive in their transnational (across tribal nations) approach an added rich dimension to tribe-specific literary criticism, one that I am ultimately placing in conversation with what I am proposing is slowly becoming a trans-indigènitude poetic project. In an attempt to engage in these discussions, this short chapter adds another layer to transnationalism, and that is, the manufacturing of trans-indigènitude through poetry—not only across Indigenous nations and their political, cultural, and aesthetic specificities, but also across the particularities of nationstates and settler divides that affect Indigenous peoples in specific ways. Thus, what such study purports is an understanding of trans-indigènitude and its inherent transnationalism as working parallel to Transnational American Studies as a field and discipline but beyond it as well as a “poetic project” because it enables and performs its own unique intellectual and aesthetic formation. The next sections situate the stealth work in key nation-states of Abiayala within these discussions and propose that it contributes to the building of a trans-indigènitude through literary festivals. These poetic gatherings have established a tradition of transcending the nationstate parameters of indigeneity and have, in great part, remained understudied and uncharted despite their bringing together a multiplicity of languages and peoples who share important similarities as well as differences in languages, nations and cultures. Lastly, I offer an analysis of three Indigenous women poets.

Abiayala (Latin American) background Indigenous communities in Abiayala differ from the North in the way identity is articulated. In the northern countries like Canada and the US, treaties allow for legal tribal citizenship as a primordial form of identity—even though other ways of claiming indigeneity manifest—tribal citizenship remains the most important. In Abiayala, no comparable legal treaties exist with nation-states, and the main way Indigenous peoples identify is based on language and local territory. By making this distinction, my point is that in the US, writers and academics tend to emphasize national citizenship as opposed to language or ethnic descent. Another important difference is that while the US (tellingly Canada has not ratified it either) recognizes tribal sovereignty, it has not ratified ILO l69,3 whereas many nation-states in Abiayala have altered their constitutions to recognize and support Indigenous communities, languages, spiritual practices, and cultures since the early 1990s.4 Recall the ideological battles about Columbus in the l990s, the genocidal war in Guatemala, the Zapatistas uprising in Mexico, and the United Nations declaring it the decade of Indigenous peoples. These political gains, of course, are a result of local and international organizing. With over 45 million people identifying as Indigenous in Abiayala, the number of communities is a little over 800.5 The networks that have emerged from local and transnational efforts have also led to a valorization of autonomous Indigenous political and literary projects as “Abiayalan.” 118

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Building blocks and the role of poetry The political breakthroughs in both local and international organizing paved the way for the emergence of Indigenous writers, intellectuals, and other artists whose creative output is a direct result of political shifts in Abiayala. Since the 1990s, the national Indigenous writers’ organization (ELIAC) in Mexico City has arranged foundational meetings geared towards thinking across Indigenous nations historically subsumed under the contemporary nation-state. Similarly, in Guatemala, the Qanjobal writer Gaspar Pedro Gonzalez organized critical meetings in 1999 and 2001, while he served as Director of the Ministry of Culture and Sports. In South America, events such as the Medellín Poetry Festival, inaugurated in 1991, profiled Indigenous nations in the same plane as nation-states in their programming. Colombia has become a locus for transnational meetings. In light of these continental literary activities, other significant poetic gatherings followed in Mexico and in the United States. However, it is Medellín’s annual Poetry Festival that from its inception placed Indigenous writers in dialogue with other poets from a literary world system that had historically ignored them. In Abiayala, culturally and politically, poetry played a central role during the 1980s, where various zines and literary magazines such as Prometeo and Interregno, among others surfaced to combat political repression. Colombia, since the founding of the magazine Prometeo in 1982, has shared a substantive role in disseminating local and international poets, becoming a driving force behind the growth of the international poetry festival scene. As Fernando Rendón, the Director of the festival observed, “it emerged as an affirmation and celebration of life, countering the destruction affecting different sectors in Colombia.”6 Death, political chaos, and repression needed a counter act, a renewed sense of hope that may have seemed, in other geographical settings, counterintuitive. The very idea that poetry can change the world is a leftist Latin American ideal. Prometeo has a distinct online presence today. It functions as a literary and visual archive, one that captures the festival as a site of communion for Indigenous poets and non-Indigenous writers from around the world.

The Medellín poetry festival That first Medellín Poetry Festival brought together over 1,500 people. The various recitals of poetry in multiple languages created another vision of the world. Indeed, the public readings became an unexpected antidote to the fear produced by war raging in Colombia since the mid-l960s. More specifically, according to the initial group of organizers, the festival aimed to “contraponer al lenguaje de la matanza el poder vivificante de la imaginación poética [counter the language of death to the vivifying power of the poetic imagination].”7 The fact that the Festival does not exclusively focus on Indigenous poets adds to its appeal because it provides an international space that allows for the making of trans-indigènitude beyond nation-states and settler colonial divides. Indeed, it is one of the few international literary festivals that celebrates and has brought together Cree, Oneida, Innu, Maya, Zapotec, Maori, and Aborigine poets and writers side by side with other poets from Canada, the United States, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand, thus recognizing Indigenous peoples as nations in their own political right. In 1992, Abadio Green, from the Tule-Kuna nation from Panama became the first Indigenous writer to recite alongside other more established national and international poets. By the fourth Festival of poetry, 27 countries from Europe, Asia, Africa, and America participated. Renowned poets like Margaret Randall, Wole Soyinka, and Joy Harjo (Mvskokee/Creek, nation) participated in these poetic gatherings in Colombia. The Medellín Festival provides a multi-lingual space where poets render work in Indigenous languages as well as in the English, French, or Spanish. “Bilanguaging,” as Walter 119

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Mignolo and Allen Chadwick discuss, does not refer explicitly to the act of translating from one language to the other but moving between two or more languages and cultural systems, thus actively engaging the politics of their asymmetry. The Festival encourages and puts into praxis this act of bilanguaging as Indigenous poets read and engage in multilingual public performances. Translation, then, also becomes a critical tool for consuming and sharing poetry—and not just from one Indigenous language to another but also from Spanish to French or English to Spanish. Bilanguaging and translation as practices contribute to a global Indigenous imaginary understood as what I am proposing here as defining trans-indigènitude.

Trans-indigènitude in praxis The Festival has transformed from having one indigenous poet participate to a greater representation of indigenous poets and different poetic forms such as song, chant, and prayer. Through these diverse types of visual, auditory, and performative dimensions, the Festival offers what Chadwick Allen terms “purposeful juxtapositions” of indigenous texts. Purposeful indigenous juxtapositions, according to Allen, can lead to a methodology that contributes to global indigenous studies. Yet the comparative turn in indigenous studies, in thinking through these purposeful juxtapositions, poses a paradoxical challenge: scholars working in indigenous studies are inevitably establishing a Global Indigenous Studies but they are doing so in English. In order for us to better understand what a Global Indigenous Studies may look like, to embrace and theorize it, we must learn to work across languages, translations, and work beyond our comfort zones of inquiry—even if this is not always easy. Some works are simply not available at local libraries or Amazon. Above all, we must be committed to translation of our own work while acknowledging its complexity and political dimensions. And, while I find Allen’s text inspiring and exquisite, he like many of us, furthers the primacy of a global indigenous literary studies primarily practiced in English. Writing and publishing in an indigenous language along with Spanish, French, or Portuguese remains a political act, one that may more aptly describe what may be considered a Global Indigenous Studies. Nonetheless, Allen’s analyses may drive “the study of contemporary indigenous literatures written primarily in English around the globe” while his notions of “recovery” and “interpretation” can offer us a way of thinking through other indigenous productions not produced in English. Indeed, his discussion of “how might such juxtapositions contribute to calls not only for the intellectual and artistic sovereignty of specific nations but also for indigenous intellectual artistic sovereignty global in scope” drives my interest in the women’s poems I here examine (Allen 2012, xviii).

Trans-indigènitude I have selected three poems by indigenous women who have participated in the Medellín Festival and who hail from very different parts of the world to demonstrate how the transindigènitude poetry project has been forming. Following Molly McGlennen’s discussion of Native literature in the North where “indigenous women poets highlight some of the limitations of nationalistic approaches to understanding their work just as it suggests how central tribal identity is,” I accentuate the trans-indigènitude aspects of their work. According to McGlennen (2014), Native American Literary nationalism has focused more on narratives and autobiography and less on poetry, which is, interestingly, the genre most indigenous women use. In counter-distinction, in Abiayala/Latin America, indigenous literature has tended to focus mainly on poetry and began mainly by men. McGlennen argues for an analysis of poetry because it offers different ways of thinking about indigeneity as it intersects with questions of 120

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displacement, diaspora, and queerness. What can these poetic renditions and their juxtaposition offer us? And how do they point to greater notions of a trans-indigènitude?

The poets In 2008, Rita Mestokosho’s name resounded among the many writers named in Marie Gustave Le Clézio’s Nobel acceptance speech as the Innu poet “who lends her voice to trees and animals.” Born in Quebec, Rita Mestokosho also happens to be the first person writing in Innu to also publish in French. I first read her work in a Spanish translation in Mexico in 2004. The poems published in La Jornada had been translated from the French to the Spanish alongside the Innu. Her work has not been published in English yet and I hope sharing her work here inspires people more fluent in French than myself to translate more of her work so that her “My School of Thought” It’s It’s It’s It’s It’s

“Mi escuela de pensamiento”

the forest that grows the calm of the mind the freedom of the heart the caribou waiting Papakassiku, the master of the caribou.

Es el bosque que empuja es la calma del espíritu es la libertad del corazón es el caribu que espera es Papakassiku, el amo del caribu.

My school of thought It’s the river flowing It’s the north mountain It’s the snow falling It’s the wind calling me.

Mi escuela de pensamiento Es el río que corre es la montaña del Norte es la nieve que cae es el viento que me llama.

This is where the wind travels freely through the mountains and descends along the big rivers. This is where I am calm, where I return to find the freedom of my ancestors.

Es el paraje donde el viento viaja ibremente a través de las montañas y desciende siguiendo los grandes ríos. Es allí donde estoy tranquila, allí donde vuelvo a encontrar la libertad de mis ancestros.

My school of thought

Mi escuela de pensamiento

This is the traditional territory The huge boreal forest. This is where words come to life This is where words really make sense. My poetry comes from the language of the earth that is returning from a long journey.

Es el territorio tradicional la inmensa floresta boreal. Es allí donde las palabras cobran vida es allí donde las palabras cobran verdaderamente sentido. Mi poesía brota de una lengua de tierra que regresa de un largo viaje.

My school of thought It’s the plant that heals It’s the richness that captivates my spirit it feeds my body it improves my fortune Because I believe in it

Mi escuela de pensamiento Es la planta que cura esta riqueza que cautiva mi espíritu que nutre mi cuerpo que mejora mi suerte porque yo lo creo

It’s every moment that exists for the joy of thinking That I am an Innu till the bottom of my soul A soul as deep as the earth itself.

es cada instante que existe para la dicha de pensar que soy una innu hasta el fondo del alma un alma tan profunda como la tierra misma.

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poetry is read. Beyond the linguistic challenges, I had to face the fact that not one library in the United States carries her books. Mestokosho asserts, “[o]ur life and survival are linked to the survival of the rivers, the forests and the lakes. Writing in a language, in the French language is also a necessity. It enables us to reach a wider audience.”8 In one of the poems she shared in Poetry Festival of Medellín (2012) the imagery speaks to the Innu’s vision of nature, spirit, and identity. Her poem, “My School of Thought,” affirms an education that is grounded in Innu’s relationship to land, the sacred, and body as land. Her “school of thought” is the forest, the Innu cosmogony and its language. I am conscious, of course, that I am working from a French to Spanish to English translation and that I have only heard the Innu version. I cite the poem in its entirety in my English language translated version from the French and Spanish versions.9 Here, I am following the French version’s format for its translation. One of the first structural elements to note about the poem is its flow. The repetition of phrases such as “It’s” and “This is” reflects an oral trace indicative of its prayer structure, containing an affirmation and an embodiment of Innu territory. McGlennen asserts in her detailed analysis of gender and genre that such poetry is closer to chant and prayer. The poem’s structure praises the territory of her ancestors by naming different sites of knowledge; this is the real education. She is countering her “school of thought” with the forced boarding school experience by communities in Canada. It is an affirmation of her humanity as the very name Innu translates into human. It is not easy to recognize that I inhabit me the wrap that covers me is not the tarachi that my mother Nunkui wove

No es fácil reconocer que habito en mi la envoltura que me cobija No es el tarachi que tejió mi madre Nunkui

Nor is it the skin of Shakaim Not his blood turned into color However the perfume that adorns me seduces my instincts and I awake sheltered by the arms of Arutam.

Tampoco es la piel de Shakaim Ni su sangre hecha color Sin embargo el perfume que me adorna seduce mis instintos y despierto cobijada por los brazos de Arutam.

Mutant fingers brought by the conquerors intended to make my destiny like the eagle I glide under the skin of the wind. Jíbara was the name with which I was whipped gust of ammunition and gunpowder were the seeds in my heart they took for the Spanish crown the most sacred delicacies to calm their thirst for dead stone.

Dedos mutantes que trajeron los conquistadores pretendieron confeccionar mi destino como águila me deslicé bajo la piel del viento Jíbara fue el nombre con el que me latigaron ráfaga de municiones y pólvora fue la semilla en mi corazón tomaron para la corona española los más sagrados manjares para calmar su sed de piedra muerta.

I wake up swimming in a world of new ideas like Nantar in the farm of my mother with a song and cry at the same time like a yucca seed— endless numbers. Nanur is not dead, the warrior flies free, enters without knocking leaves without farewells born in every fertile sperm in each fertile ovule in every word I paint not the claw of the audacious Ayumpum is strong enough as to silence my voice.

Despierto nadando en un mundo de ideas nuevas como nantar en la chacra de mi madre con un canto y lloro a la vez como semilla de yuca— números sin fin. Nanur no ha muerto, vuela libre el guerrero entra sin llamar se va sin despedidos nace en cada esperma fértil en cada Óvulo fecundo en cada palabra que pinto ni la garra del audaz Ayumpum es tan fuerte como para callar mi voz.

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Maria Clara Sharupi was born and raised in the Amazon jungle of Ecuador; as such, her knowledge comes from the elders of her community. She represents one of the most important of a small handful of Shuar poets and benefitted from the routes/roots the Festival has spawned because it was after her 2012 presentation in Colombia that she was also invited to participate in gatherings in Mexico. After learning about her participation in both countries, I invited her to read and perform her poetry at UCSD. Sharupi is working on her first book of poetry, Tiramit, rendered in her native language, Spanish, and English. As of today, it has not been published. A few years ago, Sharupi noted that it was “impossible and utopic to think that women could express and write their feelings and emotions.” She read “Como nantar y namur” in Medellín, and her performance/reading is captured in Prometeo’s visual archive. The poem originally written in Shuar Chicham and Spanish shares references to Shuar cosmology and affirms identity and nature as represented by the Amazon jungle. I initially transcribed from the visual video, but was also privy to the discussion she led at UCSD and her unpublished manuscript. The centrality of her local indigenous nation is referenced in the objects, as well as in the cultural and historical allusions she makes. For example, the speaker references the tarachi, which is a Shuar woman’s dress. She also references Shuar cosmogony and cosmology by including Nunkui and Shakaim, feminine and masculine deities, as well as Ayumpun who, in Shuar mythology, was an astute warrior that despite having been punished incarnated into a giant condor.10 Nature reflects her local environment. The third poem is “The Taming Power of Small Changes” by Roberta Hill. She spent part of her life in the Oneida community of Wisconsin. Hill is a professor at the University of Wisconsin and has taught on the Onedia and Rosebud reservations. Hill has authored several poetry books. While Hill did not read in an indigenous language, her poem was translated into Spanish during the festival. Her reading/performance is also captured by Prometeo’s archive. It shares with the others an abundance of references to nature, heritage, politics, and healing. I transcribed the poem from the visual archive.11 Based on my search, the poem has not been published under this title and it is possible that its format is different and that its title may change in the future. “The Taming Power of Small Changes” The taming power of small changes Each seed begins asking questions as it opens doors into earth. it is good to get out of step with Stasis One Small change of habit suddenly done without much thought stirs up ancient rhythms from beyond. and it’s like snowflakes falling calling blizzard winds to join them it’s like nubs of rocks shifting the rivers weight to create more flow healing power lives in eddies. it’s good feeling out of step with the same old same old same with one small change you may feel new sunlight pulsing through you and all you love. 123

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The poem draws connections between the force of nature and change. Through small changes, society can take big steps towards embracing life. The speaker calls on the audience to reject the status quo. These small changes also allude to ancient ways of life. Like the other poets, Roberta Hill affirms her identity through nature and a dialogue with society. The three poems invoke specific indigenous cultural and national symbols. They reflect a strong relationship to the power of nature, blurring culture/nature distinctions. The poems highlight deep ancestral connections to the land and ancestors. The sacred, territory, and indigenous women are concatenated in the poetry. Another important theme that connects these poems is the movement from individual to community. The “I” is also the collective. They also differ. Each poet marks her performance through her own particular experience as an indigenous woman. Rita Mestokosho does so by invoking specific cultural symbols such as Innu cosmology: the sacred caribou and Papakassiku (master of all animals). Maria Clara Sharupi similarly invokes a Shuar cosmology, as well as accentuating her traditional face painting, usually with reference to animals whose powers one wants to possess. She represents the Shuar Chicham through the arm bracelets. Her poetic renditions reference and reclaim the word “savage” to describe the Shuar warriors who were called jíbaros or savages because they practiced head deformation or shrinking of their enemies’ heads. Similarly, Roberta Hill’s poem invokes ancestral memory, nature, and the joining of people and nature to effect social change. Hill’s poem references earth, wind, water, and fire—tropes that are part of many indigenous poetic references but that retain their specificity here because they reference the particular way these reflect the Wisconsin landscape in the winter.

Trans-indigènitude poetry in the making These readings and analyses reflect the need for translation and bilanguaging—practices critical to the building of trans-indigènitude in the twenty-first century. The poems stage, read, and come together through this literary circuit, inspiring new roots/routes such as Sing: Poetry of the Americas edited by poet Allyson Hedge-Coke. I conclude by emphasizing that in order for critics to participate in a true global indigenous study the labor involved in moving beyond works in English to theorize the organic constitution of trans-indigènitude awaits. Multilingualism has to be part of our methodology even if it is in translation with all of its imperfections. Indeed, what we can take from trans-indigènitude is that we don’t have to be fluent but willing to understand across languages and nations. The real challenge is for those parts of the world where English dominates, as in Abiayala, multilingualism has been part of the project since the very first meetings. Indigenous writers in Abiayala have already moved towards trans-indigènitude literature by establishing the World Coordination of Creators in Indigenous Languages (Coordinación Mundial de Creadores en Lenguas Originarias) or CMCLO putting forth the building blocks for a Global Indigenous Studies.

Notes 1 Aymara leader Takir Mamani posed “Abya Yala” to rename the continent. Mamani argued that “placing foreign names on our towns, cities and continents is tantamount to subjecting our identity to the will of our invaders and their heirs” (quoted in Albó 1995, 33). In more recent years, the Guna (formerly known as Kuna) have changed their orthography and my use of the term reflects this change. 2 See Hsinya Huang’s review of Chadwick Allen. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Literary Studies. College Literature 41.1 (Winter 2014): 195–98. 3 For more information on the countries that ratified it, see: http://www.ilo.org/global/regions/la ng–en/index.htm.

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Trans-indigènitude in circuits of poetry 4 The International Labor Organization is a United Nations Agency formed in 1919 to set labor standards. ILO 169 convention was enacted to change its earlier position on indigenous peoples as having to assimilate to the dominant society in language, dress, religious practice etc. 5 See CEPAL, Los pueblos indígenas en América Latina. Avances en el ultimo decenio y retos pendientes para la garantía de los derechos. Santiago de Chile: Naciones Unidas, 2014. Some of the larger countries that have ratified the convention are Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, among many others. 6 You can read about the aims of the first festival here: https://www.festivaldepoesiademedellin.org/es/ Festival/Historia/index.html. 7 See Rendón’s account here: https://www.festivaldepoesiademedellin.org/es/Festival/Historia/index. html. 8 Interview cited in http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:989904/FULLTEXT01.pdf. 9 I found the French version here and follow its stanza breaks: http://emmila.canalblog.com/archives/ 2009/10/20/15511245.html. 10 Nunkui is a feminine deity of abundance and propensity in Shuar cosmology. Shakaim is a deity for men’s strength and power. Nantar represents a sacred stone that the Shuar woman used in the farm to have a better harvest and products as well as more animals, whereas Nanur is the sacred stone used by men for strength and valor in war and fishing. Ayumpun comes from Shuar cosmology and represents an astute being who was punished and since then incarnated into a giant condor. The condor is a very important reference in Andean cosmology. 11 See youtube.com/watch?v=Mnok97dO6IU. I paid attention to the poet’s shifts and the natural punctuation, but this rendition may not reflect the author’s format or punctuation though I transcribed verbatim.

Bibliography Albó, Xavier. “Our Identity Starting from Pluralism in the Base.” The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America. Eds. John Beverley, José Oviedo, and Michael Aronna. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995. 18–33. Allen, Chadwick. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Clifford, James. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013. Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays A Tribal Voice. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. McGlennen, Molly. Creative Alliances: the Transnational Designs of Indigenous Women’s Poetry. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. Medellín. “The Poetry Festival of Medellín Does Not Sympathize with War.” 2018. Revista Prometeo. “El poder domador de los cambios pequeños.” (Roberta Hill, Estados Unidos, Nación Oneida). YouTube, 12 Feburary 2011. Revista Prometeo, “Como Nantar y Namur.” (María Clara Sharupi, Ecuador, Nación Shuar).” YouTube, 11 September 2012. Revista Prometeo, “Mi escuela de pensamiento.” (Rita Mestokosho, Canada, Nacion Innu). YouTube, 12 Feburary 2012. Warrior, Robert. “Native American Scholarship and the Transnational Turn.” Cultural Studies Review 14.2 (2009): 119–130. Weaver, Jace, et al. American Indian Literary Nationalism. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. Womack, Craig S. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

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11 TRAVELING SOUNDS Haitian vodou, Michael Jackson, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers Sabine Kim

Introduction: Traveling sounds Despite the best intentions of record companies to limit and protect songs as legal entities tied to one particular legal subject, music, singing, and sounds as such have the propensity to stray across boundaries of all kinds. When Michael Jackson’s dance routines are taken up by Filipino prisoners in tribute to the artist after his death, for example, and become a tourist attraction for visitors from all over the world, the cultural meaning of Michael Jackson’s Thriller becomes much broader than purely an American product consumed globally. At the least, it is also a Filipino global cultural good, circulated as a YouTube video that has received more than 50 million hits, with a Filipino performance context, an ensemble featuring the openly gay Filipino Wenjiel Resane playing the role of the girl, and uploaded by the warden of the maximum-security prison in Cebu. The reform aims of the prison warden draw on a Jacksonian history of artistic rebelliousness, intense selfdiscipline, and a rags-to-riches narrative to position the penitentiary’s mandatory exercise program as an innovative way to reduce tension between inmates, maintain their health, and facilitate a feeling of community. Warden Byron Garcia introduced mandatory exercise reportedly as a way to keep prisoners occupied in a pleasant manner while increasing their fitness levels. Pop music, and Michael Jackson’s music in particular, was a way of making dance acceptable to the male inmates (Mangaoang 2013, 47). More importantly, however, Jackson’s place in cultural memory had been bolstered by his sold-out concert in the Philippines in 1996, and his celebrity status (even diminished as it was by the time of his death in 2009) became a means for the warden to bring international attention to his prison’s unique reform measure. Jackson’s fame as an innovator of American pop, in other words, made him available as cultural leverage to internationalize the Filipino prisoners’ activity. This marks a point whereby Michael Jackson is no longer or not only American but rather has a transnational American status, infringing upon Filipino cultural identity and being infringed upon it in turn, as suggested by the existence of the posthumous Michael Jackson Fan Club of the Philippines, founded in 2009 on what would have been the artist’s 51st birthday. On the one hand, the rehearsals and the dance practice at the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Centre (CPDRC) are a clever marketing strategy of the Philippine 126

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disciplinary apparatus, masking the prison surveillance and mistreatment of inmates within the format of pop cultural entertainment (see Mangaoang 2013, 52; Perillo 2011, 615–616). On the other hand, there is a dimension of defamiliarization of national identity that, although it may not necessarily have a positive effect for individual prisoners may nevertheless bring the fixity of state boundaries into question and allow existence outside the state’s authority to be imagined. On the screen, a mass of men identically dressed in orange ill-fitting prison garb stumble across the CPDRC courtyard with the blind, inexorable movements of the living dead, visually echoing the menace of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Inmates of Cebu Province’s maximum-security penitentiary in the Philippines, the men in this 2007 YouTube video are at the same time prisoners getting their mandatory exercise as well as performers creating their own version of Jackson’s short film. After the video went viral, the Dancing Inmates, as they came to be known, were seen on news channels across the United States following Jackson’s death in 2009, in a new version they performed as a tribute to the artist. Framed as evidence of Jackson’s global fan base, implying the putative power and reach of American pop culture, the news clips of the prisoners’ video were presented in a way that emphasized the performance’s mimicry as something derivative. Yet, as Homi Bhabha has shown in his seminal postcolonial analyses, mimicry in a colonial context is not straightforward copying by the colonial subjects of the supposedly superlative colonizers but rather very much a double-sided phenomenon, producing ambivalent effects (Bhabha 1994, 85–92). My contention is that the Filipino prisoners “re-enacting” a scene from Michael Jackson’s Thriller video grasp American culture and reflect it back in ways that defamiliarize—recasting race relations as zombie wars and suggesting the cage-like quality of all-consuming desire, despite its being sold to shoppers as their ultimate exercise in freedom. Significantly, the vehicle for this transnational exchange of cultural critique is a video shared on YouTube. The nature of performance, and in particular of sound, as a phenomenon that travels across borders, is often celebrated as something inherently liberatory. Yet, following the critiques of sound studies scholar Jennifer Lynn Stoever concerning the disciplinary aspects of sound (Stoever 2016; Stoever-Ackerman 2011) and power’s association with control of cultural archives (Attali 1985), I argue that paying attention to cultural practices involving sound enables us to examine invisible modes of social power. Sound under slavery, for example, had a close relationship to confinement and constraint (e.g. forced to sing and dance on the slave ship’s deck and the auction block to demonstrate the vigor that would drive up the sale price) and it is this tension between being confined by boundaries and being able to cross them that makes sound powerful as a transnational vehicle, carrying cultural memory across borders and intermingling the worlds of the living and the dead. In what follows, I analyse three instances in which performances of sound expose these power relations and social hierarchies and push back against their containment, namely, prison inmates compelled to dance; vodou recordings that remind diasporic Haitians of their obligations and ties to Haiti; and the gospel performances by freedmen and former slaves from America for nineteenth-century European audiences.

They Don’t Care About Us as a Filipino cultural product The men in the prison courtyard form three masses. There is a group on the left, on the right, and at the front, each comprised of orderly rows. It is the Cebu maximum-security inmates performing a new choreography of Michael Jackson’s They Don’t Care About Us. The rhythmic beats, spaced widely apart, mimic the sound of heavy footsteps marching on concrete. The military evocation of this sound is visually amplified in Michael Jackson’s concert 127

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version played in Munich (1997), where the performers are dressed in shimmery metallic army boots and gold or silver uniforms. The corporeal language of abrupt turns, stiff legs, arms and hands fused in military salute seems to recall Germany’s fascist past in an uncritical way. But in the CPDRC, although the penitentiary context might be expected to reinforce the sense of surveillance through orderliness—the uniform lines of inmates who must display their conformity with the prison rules through the discipline they exercise over their own bodies—the choreography of surveillance is somewhat altered by the nature of the act of performing for a double audience. That is, the prisoners perform the desired docility for the prison officials and the media, but the prisoners are also actually dancing and there is nevertheless simultaneously a theatrical performance taking place, with all its possibilities for ambiguous interpretation. The music, which has so many valences, enables these two contradictory elements of freedom and confinement, desire and dehumanization, to reside ambiguously in the selfsame gesture, vocalization, even the silence of what is unspoken. Áine Mangaoang has criticized the effectiveness of the rehabilitation-through-dance program, arguing that the skills learned do not equip inmates for re-entering social life after being released (Mangaoang 2013, 53). It is certainly true that the Philippine state benefits most directly from the performances, which are consumed globally and have shone a bright light on the CPDRC as a world-leading penitentiary (the warden was awarded a US prize for innovation in 2008). I agree with Mangaoang’s critique but would add that, in its separation of prison and non-prison life, the critique overlooks a certain continuity between the penitentiary and the workplace as common sites of neoliberal “docility.” The veiled coercion at CPDRC, with prisoners being offered special treats for participation, or with rumours of privileges being suspended for nonparticipating inmates (Senojan 2008) bears a resemblance to the forced voluntarism that Frédéric Lordon sees in the neoliberalized workplace, in which employees “happily” participate in their own exploitation in the form of unpaid overtime or agreement with unsociable shift hours (Lordon 2014 [2010], xii). With this modification, I am not trying to equate the conditions of prison and workplace, since that would be to downplay the rights violations in prisons that involve deprivation of food, overcrowding, psychological and physical abuse, and the use of torture to obtain confessions. Rather, I am suggesting that one of the reasons for the success of the dance program—which, after the CPDRC Thriller video went viral, was copied at eight other prisons in the Philippines, the government implementing a policy making exercise mandatory for prisoners—lies in the manner in which it succeeded in identifying this affective similarity between the happy domination of the workplace and the “big smiles” of the CPDRC inmates participating in the dance program (Senojan 2008). In Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire, Lordon notes that past critiques of workers consenting to their exploitation have relied on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, “whose concept of symbolic violence aimed precisely at thinking through the intersections of domination and consent” (Lordon 2014 [2010], xii). However, the potential for critique remains “open” (Lordon 2014 [2010], xii) due to what Lordon sees as a “conceptual impoverishment” (Lordon 2014 [2010], xiii) concerning the idea of consent, too often reduced to the notion of voluntary servitude. Rather, Lordon suggests we should focus on the curious operation of triangulation whereby one person’s desire is harnessed in the service of another’s power to act, resulting in particular affects, feelings of being “mobilized,” “reluctant,” “even rebellious” (Lordon 2014 [2010], xiii). How is it that we are coerced, persuaded, “made to” aid and abet a plan that is not of our own devising (Lordon 2014[2010], xii)? Lordon’s analysis of this “mystery of being recruited in another person’s service” (Lordon 2014[2010], xiii) sheds light on the 128

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familiarity of Filipinos with the coercions of overseas work. The deep structures of disenfranchisement make it far more economically viable for Filipino citizens to endure the risks, financial cost, and other tribulations of migrating in pursuit of work elsewhere. Roughly one in ten Filipinos works abroad and sends remittances home, making the country one of the most transnational nations in the world (Rodriguez 2010, 12). In arguing that the CPDRC version of They Don’t Care About Us is a Filipino cultural product, and not a Filipino imitation of a US American pop hit, I am also arguing that the meaning of Michael Jackson’s artistic work has been altered not just for Filipino audiences but for an American public as well. The original’s audio sample of Martin Luther King, Jr., becomes the new focus of the Cebu version; where the Munich concert featured the Stars and Stripes unfurling from the stage in a gesture that, ironically, separates Michael Jackson visually from the audio track sample of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, in the CPDRC choreography, a performer marches with a placard showing the iconic news photo of MLK addressing the thousands of demonstrators during his “I Have a Dream” speech, which draws attention to the moment when we can hear King. Here sound and sight work together. In other words, the Philippine They Don’t Care About Us uses King to insert the “King of Pop” into a new genealogy of black American cultural production that positions the latter’s aesthetic work as politicized and progressive. Where musician and journalist Bob Stanley could consider Bad as the artist’s response to accusations of “selling out to whitey” (Stanley 2013, 553), as an album that foregrounds elements of disco and machine soul, the musical lineage represented in the CPDRC performances align his signature moves with the dance language of hip hop, a cultural form with deeply transnational affiliations (Chang 2005; Rose 1994). The Michael Jackson who emerges in the Philippine dance videos is one who is implicitly heroic, as King was, and a fighter against injustice and an oppressive system.

Haitian vodou: Maintaining the bonds of religious community in the diaspora Vodou, “the African-based spiritual world of the people of Haiti carried to the Caribbean by slaves” (Tippet and Bellgarde-Smith 2008, 145), is deeply embedded in the everyday practices of Haitians but is not always openly observed because of its long history of being maligned. Ordering the relationships among and between the living and the dead, vodou1 is a belief system that encompasses not only religion but also philosophy, politics, medicine, and the arts in Haiti. The common association of vodou with witch doctors sticking pins into puppet surrogates is false but very persistent. Stereotyped images of vodou as black magic were widely circulated in movies such as White Zombie (1932), with Bela Lugosi playing the evil sorcerer, and other Hollywood films of the 1920s and 1930s and were echoed in rumormongering newspaper reports about vodou ceremonies that putatively involved child sacrifices and cannibalism; these fantastic accounts were prevalent at a time when the US government was attempting to undermine Haiti’s success as the first black republic and to justify the ongoing US military occupation of Haiti (Gordon 2012). Although given official recognition in the early 2000s by then President Aristide, [v]odou has come to reside in the Western category of religion, but still does so uneasily. It is made to oscillate between being the mark of alterity (for EuroAmericans) and the threat of rural popular political power (for the Haitian political elite). In 2003, it was made to occupy the space of “cultural heritage,” but since the 129

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2010 earthquake, it has been pushed once again into the place of primitivism and anti-progressivism. (Lowe 2014) The US evangelist Pat Robertson notoriously claimed Haiti’s catastrophic earthquake in 2010 was a result of vodou’s “pact with the devil” (Wall and Clerici 2015), and during the elder Duvalier’s dictatorship, vodou was alternately used to intimidate opponents by claiming an association with vodou powers and to accuse others of being vodouisants in order to delegitimize them. Vodou was traditionally the religion of the Fon and Ewe-speaking people for hundreds of years when it was carried by slaves from Dahomey (present-day Benin, Nigeria, Togo) to Haiti in the eighteenth century. Haiti, then named Saint-Domingue, was stripped of its forests and turned into a vast system of sugar plantations that was divided between Spanish and French colonial control. Haitian vodou emerged from the cruelty of plantation slavery, being one of the ways in which resistance to enslavement was articulated and it continues to be practised as a general form of resistance to oppression, its interventions creating space for queer identities, for example (Urbistondo 2013). The form of vodou, with communal gatherings, lent itself to political council as well. In both its philosophy, history of resistance to slavery, and social form, this belief system contributed to the Haitian Revolution and the slaves successfully overthrowing the slave masters and French military forces in the Independence War. In this section, I argue that vodou is a transnational phenomenon both in its form, being located in multiple nations without any single nation having the right to claim it exclusively without narrowing its definition, and also, because of its social functions, in its contents, connecting persons across oceans and vast passages of time in a bond of spiritual community. Vodou not only circulates via relationships between persons in the community but also, and more importantly, creates those social ties itself. In this sense, as a performative act that draws together the material and the immaterial, the seen and the unseen, vodou can be thought of as an exemplary diasporic religion, through its potential to forge cultural memory and overcome physical distances and the barriers of the passage of time imposed by migration. More broadly, by looking at a specific development of vodou in the 1990s, when Haitians emigrating to the US continued to remain active in the vodou ceremonies taking place in Haiti via tape recordings transported back and forth between the two countries, certain similarities between spirituality and mobility, and between religion and sound technology, might be mapped.

Vodou as transnational technological medium By looking at Haitian vodou as it developed from the 1970s to the 1990s, when Haitians began using cassette recorders to “correspond” with each other over the long distances separating the island nation from diasporic communities in the US, I am suggesting that parallels exist between vodou practice, which affirms the ability of a person to manifest in multiple places simultaneously, and the practice of exchanging “letters” by cassette tape, which is a different but analogous kind of “calling up” of someone’s presence while they are far away. In other words, whereas cassette correspondence relies on the physical operations of a cassette recorder and playback machine, vodou fulfils a similar media function—but without a material technological apparatus. I am not making an argument of technological determinism, in which the cassette recorder would be seen as an advancement—technological progress—that “improves” vodou. On the contrary, my point is rather that Haitian vodou 130

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lends itself to being practiced via cassette tape precisely because it is already contains the conceptual framework by which recordings are understood as an authentic representation of voice.2 As a communication medium without a material technological apparatus, vodou is itself a media network for sharing an expressive culture that is a crossroads intersecting the spiritual practices, social beliefs, and shared geopolitical histories of Haiti, West Africa, and the United States. Approximately one in five Haitians have left Haiti to pursue work elsewhere. The incorporation of the Caribbean nation into this neoliberal transnational flow of capital has led to a separation of families and communities. Miami and New York are the contemporary key sites of Haitian migration in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Haitians forcibly impoverished in the late 1970s by the collapse of the agriculture industry—a problem linked to the extensive deforestation that took place in the colonial period, when land was cleared for sugarcane fields—emigrated to the US to work as migrant farm workers and then—after being punished by the industry for successfully suing growers for infringement of health and safety laws—were forced to other sectors such as tourism, construction, hospitality, cleaning services. This was the period when tens of thousands fled the terror and death threats of “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s regime and migrated to Florida. This was also the age of boom boxes. Equipped with the ability to both play back and record sound, these portable cassette machines were affordable and easily obtained, being sold at almost every corner store. This ease of access to the technology was important, because it circumvented the lacking infrastructure and formal conditions necessary for a phone line (fixed address, proof of identity, credit worthiness, etc.). Those who have left Haiti stay in touch with those back home through an informal courier service—“[i]ndependent entrepreneurs … specialize in the business of ‘coming and going’” and allow the safe and efficient delivery of money, correspondence and gifts (Richman 2005). For example, the rural village of Ti Rivyè has parcel service delivered by a man who makes biweekly trips between there and Palm Beach (Richman 2002, 120). The boom box is “an appropriate gift to send back home, best if the price tag is still conspicuously attached” (Richman 2002, 121). The enduring popularity of cassette recordings for facilitating vodou communities abroad and at home in Haiti to remain bound together had several reasons. Audio and video recordings have been a means for the subjugated poor in Haiti to engage with family who have migrated to the US and elsewhere. Popular because they enable a kind of oral “writing” of letters in Creole and thus overcome the barrier for the illiterate poor, as well as avoiding French as the language of the colonial past, cassette recordings were in increasingly wide circulation in the 1980s and 1990s. As a sign of their popularity, the anthropologist Karen Richman comments “[c]orresponding by cassette became so normal that for many Haitians the verb ‘to write (a letter)’ (ekri) means recording a cassette rather than putting pen to paper or typing an email” (Richman and Rey 2009, 151–152). Cassette letters are a special form of correspondence, with characteristics that are unique to the genre: “formulaic greetings, salutations, routines for posing questions to a range of listeners, and patterns for talking about accompanying or forthcoming remittances, even patterned ways of interaction with the ‘writer’s’ voice while listening to his or her tape” (Richman 2002, 120–121). However, even after the advent of cell phones, for vodou practitioners who no longer lived in Haiti, cassette recordings of rituals remained the best means of attending the ceremonies in absentia. Certain ritual ceremonies can only take place on family land, which is why the cassette recordings of these events fulfil an important function by allowing worshippers who have migrated away to vicariously participate in the communal gatherings. 131

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Here I am trying to argue that there is a certain affinity between vodou as a belief system and the exchange of cassette recordings across the diaspora as a communications system. Cassette recording has certain qualities, and the portability of the boom boxes which in themselves are a material symbol of the “portability” of religious faith, tie in well with vodou practices. Tapes were venues for extending an oral culture that prizes proverbs, figurative, indirect language, antiphony and fluid shifting between speech and song, especially verses drawn from the sacred song repertoire. ‘Persons of words’ exploited the medium to maintain and advance their vocal reputations across the vast distances separating members of their communities. (Richman and Rey 2009, 152) Moreover, it was the very manner in which cassette correspondence proceeded that also lent it the feel of a ritual. Both the composing of a cassette (ekri) and the event of receiving and listening to a recording took place in public and had thus a collective nature by default. Family gathered around, and if something on the recording was said that provoked a reaction, the speaker on the tape was addressed as if he or she were present and able to answer. Recipients of the cassette letters “frequently interact antiphonally with the voice as if the speaker were present, interjecting ‘yes,’ ‘no’, ‘oh my’ and the like” (Richman 2002, 121). This shared relationship could be seen as an extension of the shared ritual space of vodou. “At rituals unfolding on family land back home, worshippers and spirits who appear ‘in person’ at ceremonies personally address far-off migrants” (Richman 2002, 121). When a ceremony was being recorded on audio tape, the prayers, songs, and spoken words formed an important content but, equally vital for the person far away in Miami or New Orleans, was the ability to hear the ambient sounds of the ceremony, the chattering among the worshippers, the rustle of someone’s dress as they walked past the microphone, the rumble of the drums. All of these noises, which have no narrative content of their own, nevertheless add to the dramaturgy of the event. They function to create a theatrical situation and to create the co-presence of performer and spectator. Another layer of audition consisted of a running commentary by the person recording the ritual, who would describe the food and other offerings, the rich visual feast of the constantly moving things, persons, spirits. Through this murmured commentary and the direct address implied, the recipient of the tape would feel the bond of religious community.

The transatlantic tours of the Fisk Jubilee Singers Touring in the years following emancipation, the Fisk Jubilee Singers were the first black professional ensemble to perform Negro spirituals in public concerts. Starting from the 1870s in the United States and moving abroad to Europe, India, Australia and New Zealand, and South Africa, their songs were in a sense partially travelling the same transnational circuits of the Middle Passage but with a different exchange being effected. On the one hand, the Fisk performers called slavery into the remembrance of their audiences, performing cultural memory within a sacred, serious sphere that spoke back to the racializing and appropriative constructions of the minstrel shows, which were also popular at the time (Gilroy 1993, 89). On the other hand, through their adaptation for public performance of the spirituals—which were historically sung in the cotton fields and other sites of the slave plantation, and which often spoke in coded terms of escape to freedom—in concert halls, churches, and private 132

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homes, the Jubilee Singers opened a self-reflexive relation to slavery, a space from which to ponder and act upon the aftermath of slavery and the reconciliation work ahead (Stoever 2016). The choir’s formal evening dress and dignified bearing underscored the professionalism of the singers, who negotiated a new form of black subjectivity through their performances (Brooks 2006, 311). Through this sonic performance of memory and history, the Fisk choir also, I would argue, created a form of “moral capital,” in which their presence affirmed the social justice of the abolitionist movement but also subtly suggested that the moral debt created by the slave trade, Middle Passage, and slavery remained to be redressed. Part of the power of the Jubilee performance style, which attracted European audiences in the thousands (Metzelaar 2005, 76), lay in the singers’ development of the spiritual, itself already a syncretic form. African American spirituals were “powerful freedom songs” (Newman 1998, 25), being created under the conditions of slavery originally by Africans, who preserved African cultural forms in the musical structures of the typical call-and-response construction but adapted Bible verse for the texts that testify to suffering and also refer in open and covert ways to liberation, constituting a more private and autonomous relationship to God than the one imposed in the slaveholder’s church (Shuker 2012, 458).3 Spirituals have a claim to being the first African American musical cultural form indigenous to the United States (Newman 1998, 18), but in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois had already gone one step further by asserting that America cannot be imagined without the history and experience of African Americans as testified to in spirituals. The totality of American music (and not only African American music) is expressed in those “sorrow songs,” which constitute “the sole American music” (Du Bois 2008, 62). The Jubilee Singers, though Du Bois seems to have had them in mind when he praises the spiritual as a quintessential form, introduced a new style, however, which was responsive to the changing listening practices of nineteenth-century transatlantic audiences. Under the influence of abolitionists, both black and white, whose political work engaged a discourse of sentimentalism, white observers of black music-making were encouraged to attach emotion to the performances (Cruz 1999, 3–4). To support the didactic effect, the Jubilee performers strove for crisp enunciation so that the song texts could be clearly heard and the suffering fully grasped. The expressive gestures of swaying body and the stamping of feet which often accompanied early spirituals were also minimalized or done away with altogether. Yet although these changes may seem to suggest that the African American spiritual was diluted for a European performance context, I argue that many other performance elements underscored the history of African American slavery—including not only the group’s refusal to sing before segregated audiences (Ward 2000, xiii–xiv) but also the choice of repertoire and the decision to travel to Europe, with its colonial history of slavery. Though frequently confronted by racism, whether in the form of being refused accommodation in hotels or more subtly through exoticizing praise, the choir negotiated a transnational space for their work of cultural memory and moral settling of the debts of slavery. For one thing, the concerts in the Netherlands would usually begin with “Steal Away to Jesus” and often included “John Brown’s Body” for the encore (Metzelaar 2005, 71). The first spiritual was one that, during slavery, was traditionally sung as a signal that there would be a religious gathering in secret that night (Raboteau 1992). As Albert Raboteau explains, “[t]he religion of the slaves was both visible and invisible, formally organized and spontaneously adapted. Regular Sunday worship in the local church was paralleled by illicit, or at least informal, prayer meetings on weeknights in the slave cabins” (Raboteau 1992). By framing their concert performances with this song, the Jubilee Singers inserted another dimension of time and space into the European concert hall. This space was doubly magical, since it relied on knowledge of the song’s significance as a notice of the secret prayer 133

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meeting. The choice of song marked the nature of the performance as both commercial— aiming to raise funds for Fisk University, a HBCU—and also spiritual. Finally, “Steal Away to Jesus” could be interpreted as a potential directive for white members of the audience with reformist leanings; whereas the revivalist style of hymns often featured salvation by divine intervention, African American spirituals generally emphasized the agency of the slave, who relies on his or her own mobility to flee oppression (Stowe 105–106, quoted in Shuker 2012, 459). Closing with “John Brown’s Body,” a tribute to the abolitionist who died at the failed Harpers Ferry insurrection, the Jubilee Singers might again be directing a message to white abolitionists, reminding them that the fight against racial injustice is not yet finished. In other ways, too, the black choral group framed their performances as an exchange of perspectives, refusing to be subjected to the one-way gaze at exotic songsters. Helen Metzelaar notes, for instance, of the choir’s reception in the Netherlands that “[r]emarkably little connection was made … [to] the all-too recent Dutch colonial slavery practices” (Metzelaar 2005, 78). In fact, it was the Jubilee Singers themselves who prompted such reflection, “through donating the proceedings of their farewell concert … to the recently freed slaves in the Dutch colony Surinam.” In contrast, “[t]heir Dutch hosts preferred to concentrate on slavery in the United States” (Metzelaar 2005, 79). This response shows the contradiction of intimate song, which may bring the subject of the spirituals into close focus but yet leave self-reflexive criticism, and implications of complicity, open. For the Jubilee Singers, taking the African American spiritual to Europe,4 and symbolically reversing the Middle Passage, was a way of interacting with the past as a living history. The singing of spirituals was both an indirect message made through the coded and signifying texts and also a vehicle for activism insofar as gathering for song has the potential to create community because of the proximity and scale of many bodies assembled in one place (cf. Henriques 2003; Veal 2013).

Notes 1 The spelling variants vodou versus voodoo indicate the separate developments of the religion in Haiti and in Louisiana respectively. Fandrich notes that “voodoo” is also commonly used by English speakers as a catch-all term for everything they imagine, rightly or wrongly, to be associated with it. See Fandrich (2007, 776–779, esp. 779), for an explanation and discussion of the historical developments of the word, also including “vodun” and “voudou.” 2 See Sterne (2003) for the argument that technological media are manifestations of social desires and beliefs; he maps a cultural history of sound reproduction technologies in the Victorian period. 3 See McGinley for an argument that John and Alan Lomax’s collecting of the songs sung by African Americans as they worked in fields and prisons comprises a means of staging music as a vehicle of mobility that stood in connection with and contrast to the historical immobility of captive African Americans. Although I part ways with McGinley when she contends that “song’s ‘magic’ became a passage to African-American freedom” (McGinley 2011, 129), the symbolic nexus between social mobility and sonic mobility is worth exploring further. 4 See Anae on the Fisk Jubilee Singers in Australia and New Zealand and the reception of their music by Maori and Aboriginal performers; see Thurman for a discussion of the way German audiences relied on a cultural understanding of song which framed their response to the Jubilees’ virtuosity within the framework of a “civilizing mission.”

Bibliography Anae, Nicole. “‘[T]hey Seemed to Recognise Us as Brethren from a Far Distant Tribe’: The Influence of the Fisk Jubilee Singers among Australian and New Zealand Indigenous Communities, 1886–1936.” The Historian 80.2 (2018): 241–292. Expanded Academic. http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/ A546217468/EAIM?u=glasuni&sid=EAIM&xid=e574b005.

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Traveling sounds Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Brooks, Daphne A. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Chang, Jeff. Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation. New York: St. Martin’s, 2005. Cruz, Jon. Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Fandrich, Ina J. “Yorùbá Influences on Haitian Vodou and New Orleans Voodoo.” Journal of Black Studies 37. 5 (May, 2007): 775–791. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Gordon, Michelle Y. “‘Midnight Scenes and Orgies’: Public Narratives of Voodoo in New Orleans and Nineteenth-Century Discourses of White Supremacy.” American Quarterly 64. 4 (December 2012): 767–786. Henriques, Julian. “Sonic Dominance and the Reggae Sound System.” The Auditory Culture Reader. Eds. Michael Bull and Les Back. Oxford: Berg, 2003. 451–480. Lordon, Frédéric. Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire. Trans. Gabriel Ash. London: Verso, 2014 [2010, Capitalisme, désir et servitude]. Lowe, Lenny. “What’s ‘Religion’ Got to Do with It? Religion and Revolution in Haiti.” Blog. The Black Atlantic (2014). Duke University. Mangaoang, Áine. “Dancing to Distraction: Mediating ‘Docile Bodies’ in the Philippine Thriller Video.” Torture 23.2 (2013): 44–54. Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces. London: Bloomsbury, 1989. McGinley, Paige. “‘The Magic of the Song!’ John Lomax, Huddie Ledbetter, and the Staging of Circulation.” Performance in the Borderlands. Eds. Ramón H. Rivera-Servera and Harvey Young. London: Palgrave, 2011. 128–146. Metzelaar, Helen. “A Hefty Confrontation: The Fisk Jubilee Singers Tour the Netherlands in 1877.” Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis 55.1 (2005): 67–86. Newman, Richard. Go Down, Moses: A Celebration of the African-American Spiritual. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1998. Perillo, J. Lorenzo. “‘If I was not in prison, I would not be famous’: Discipline, Choreography, and Mimicry in the Philippines.” Theatre Journal 63.2 (2011): 607–621. Raboteau, Albert J. “The Secret Religion of the Slaves.” Christianity Today 33 (1992). Richman, Karen E. “Miami Money and the Home Gal.” Anthropology and Humanism 27.2 (2002): 119–132. Richman, Karen E. Migration and Vodou. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 2005. Richman, Karen E., and Terry Rey. “Congregating by Cassette: Recording and Participation in Transnational Haitian Religious Rituals.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 12. 2 (March 1, 2009): 149–166. Rodriguez, Robyn Magalit. Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Senojan, Alexandra A. “Dance is Part of Rehabilitation at Philippine Prison.” New York Times. July 23, 2008. Shuker, Ron. “Spiritual, African-American.” Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. Vol. 8. London: Continuum, 2012. Stanley, Bob. Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop. London: Faber, 2013. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: The Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Stoever-Ackerman, Jennifer. “Reproducing U.S. Citizenship in ‘Blackboard Jungle’: Race, Cold War Liberalism, and the Tape Recorder.” Sound Clash: Listening to American History. Spec. issue of American Quarterly 63.3 (2011): 781–806. Thurman, Kira. “Singing the civilizing mission in the land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms: the Fisk Jubilee Singers in nineteenth-century Germany.” Journal of World History 27.3 (2016): 443–471. Expanded Academic. Tippet, Krista, and Patrick Bellegarde-Smith. “Speaking of Faith: Living Vodou.” Journal of Haitian Studies 14. 2 (Fall 2008): 144–156.

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Sabine Kim Urbistondo, Josune. “Bodies Scared Sacred at the Crossroads: Vodou Loa Erzulie in Mayra Montero’s The Red of His Shadow and Ana-Maurine Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt.” Hispanet Journal 6 (March 2013): 1–32. Veal, Michael. Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013. Wall, Kim, and Caterina Clerici. “Vodou is elusive and endangered, but it remains the soul of Haitian people.” Guardian, November 7, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/07/vodou-ha iti-endangered-faith-soul-of-haitian-people. Ward, Andrew. Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Jubilee Singers Who Introduced the World to the Music of Black America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. YouTube. “‘Thriller’ (Original Upload): CPDRC Inmates Practice …” Posted by Byron F. Garcia. July 17, 2007. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMnk7lh9M3o. YouTube. “Dancing Inmate’s Michael Jackson Tribute.” Music video. Posted by Byron F. Garcia. 7 November 7, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK25cfzdTTg. YouTube. “Michael Jackson’s This is It—They Don’t Care About Us—Dancing Inmates HD.” Posted by Sony Pictures. January 22, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKtdTJP_GUI. YouTube. “Michael Jackson—They Don’t Care About Us—Munich Live 1997 Widescreen HD.” July 13, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QqCu0ktlhM.

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PART III

Translating texts and transnationalizing contexts

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12 TRANSLATING POE IN NEW YORK IN THE 1880S Or, Poe’s other transnationalism Emron Esplin

Introduction No other US writer has maintained a relationship with Spanish American letters as broad and as permanent as that of Edgar Allan Poe. For the Spanish American modernistas at the turn of the twentieth century, the so-called Boom writers of the middle of that century, the “Postboom” authors who followed, and many contemporary Spanish American writers, Poe has served and continues to serve as an inspiration. Both his poetry and his prose have influenced some of the region’s most important authors—including Rubén Darío, Leopoldo Lugones, Horacio Quiroga, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Carlos Fuentes. The modernistas revered Poe as their melancholy muse or dark poet-prophet while later writers in the region focused their attention and their praise on his horror tales, his fantastic fiction, or his detective stories. The combined influence of Poe’s poem “The Raven” and his invention of the detective genre through the Dupin tales, apart from the influence of the rest of Poe’s literary corpus, writes Poe into Spanish American literary history to the point where he is often read as a part of the tradition itself rather than as a translated author whose works have been transplanted into Spanish American letters through a complex history of translation, adaptation, and interpretation. Poe’s transnational reach, in Spanish America and across the globe, depends on the portability of his texts rather than the mobility of his person. Although some of his early biographies and a few of his obituaries suggested that Poe had travelled as far as Saint Petersburg, Russia, while in his teens in an attempt to join the Greek Revolution, Poe’s only international travel occurred in his childhood when he accompanied his foster parents, John and Frances Allan, to Britain for five years.1 Poe’s lack of travel outside the United States after his childhood stay in the British Isles, however, did not limit the international bent of his works or the transnational scope of his literary presence. As an example of the former, Poe’s renowned trio of tales about the inaugural analytic detective—C. Auguste Dupin—takes place in a detailed, although imperfect, contemporary Paris that Poe never knew. As examples of the latter, Poe’s work (both in official, acknowledged publications and also in pirated and plagiarized versions) was available in both England and France during Poe’s lifetime, and the first translations or rewritings of his prose in Spanish America appeared as early as 1847, two years before Poe’s death, in the Peruvian biweekly El instructor peruano.2 This early 139

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transnational footprint expanded exponentially after Poe’s death, and Poe’s current reputation or literary afterlife both draws sustenance from and continually renews his transnational presence. Most Poe scholarship that explores his relationship with Spanish America emphasizes the triangular relationship between Poe, the region, and Poe’s famous French advocate, Charles Baudelaire, whose Poe translations and biographical essays on Poe endeared Poe to the modernistas who then imported Poe into the Spanish American literary polysystem. Baudelaire, like Poe, has become a transnational figure whose texts resonate far beyond his home and his brief travels as a young man. Although Baudelaire never set foot in Spanish America, his work on Poe helped to disseminate Poe throughout the region in a way that Poe’s source texts did not initially accomplish on their own.3 Poe’s source texts themselves did not begin to have a serious effect on Spanish American literature until Jorge Luis Borges and several of his younger peers—the writers of the Boom—began to read Poe primarily in English. Poe’s initial entrance into Spanish American literary history, like the entry of most foreign writers into a national or regional literary polysystem outside their own, relied heavily on translation. Literary critics who analyse Poe’s relationship with Spanish America acknowledge the importance of several Spanish American translations of Poe’s texts, but they typically mention these translations as historical facts without offering much analysis of the translations themselves. The field of translation studies, however, offers several competing models that allow literary scholars to engage translations directly, and in this essay I follow a descriptive translation studies (DTS) model to briefly examine the Poe translations offered by a pair of Spanish American exiles—Venezuelan poet Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde and Cuban poet and freedom fighter José Martí—who lived in one of Poe’s home cities, New York, during the 1880s.4 Pérez Bonalde’s 1887 translation of Poe’s “The Raven” as “El cuervo” remains the most widely recognized translation of the poem into Spanish to date while Martí’s translations of Poe’s “Annabel Lee” and of a fragment of “The Raven,” in contrast, were never printed during Martí’s lifetime and are known today only as minor works in Martí’s otherwise well-known corpus. The descriptive approach I adopt in this piece does not judge these translations as “good” or “poor,” “better” or “worse,” “successful” or “unsuccessful” according to the now debunked concept of “fidelity.” Instead, it examines Poe’s source texts and Pérez Bonalde’s translation as significant cultural productions that wield real power within the literary traditions of both source and target cultures. It also points to Martí’s unpublished Poe translations as indications of Martí’s and Pérez Bonalde’s close friendship, as evidence of Poe’s early influence in Spanish America (even before the modernistas), and as signs of a tantalizing but untapped project from Martí’s literary life. My descriptive analysis both reiterates Poe’s influence on Spanish American letters and emphasizes the importance of translation for Poe’s growing reputation throughout the region. It also unveils a different type of transnationalism that Poe scholars have, up to this point, ignored—the role of the translator as a literal transnational figure who, in this case, physically crosses borders to enter the home space of the author of the source text, engages a community of other translators who are also transplants in the home of that writer, translates the source text in this cosmopolitan but foreign space, and then, either withholds his translations or disseminates them into the target culture from which he is currently exiled. Both Pérez Bonalde and Martí passed significant parts of their lives as political exiles outside of their respective homelands, and both poets spent multiple years living, writing, and translating in New York City. New York served as Pérez Bonalde’s primary residence for several years during the 1870s and 1880s, and Martí lived in New York on and off through the 1880s and early 1890s. During their decade of overlap in New York, Martí and Pérez 140

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Bonalde became close friends. They read and commented on one another’s work, attended the same social functions, and spent time with each other’s families. Neither author’s collected works contain letters between them, but Martí’s correspondence with other friends, as recorded in his multivolume Obras completas, sheds light upon this friendship between exiles. In a late 1881 letter to Diego Jugo Ramírez, Martí claimed that in New York his “limited hours of relaxation are Venezuelan hours” that he “shares with Bonalde and Gutiérrez Coll” (Martí 1991, Vol. 7, 269); in several letters from that same winter, Martí praised Pérez Bonalde’s poetry and asked different friends in Havana to treat the Venezuelan well as he visited them in Cuba (Martí 1991, Vol. 20, 289–292, 297–298); and in a much later letter to Manuel Mercado, Martí lamented Pérez Bonalde’s deteriorating health—calling him an “unhappy victim of morphine” (Martí 1991, Vol. 20, 123).5 Martí also wrote a lengthy and laudatory prologue for Pérez Bonalde’s best known poem, “El poema del Niagara” (Martí 1991, Vol. 7, 221–238). Living in this cosmopolitan center, Martí and Pérez Bonalde found other exiles who shared their political ideas, intellectuals and artists who shared their literary tastes, and both literary and fiscal markets for their work as translators. Martí translated both for money and for pleasure while Pérez Bonalde focused on translating works by two of his favorite poets— Heinrich Heine and Poe. Martí’s 1880s translations include Hugh Conway’s novel Called Back and several books of a “didactic nature,” all of which Martí translated for D. Appleton and Company in order to “put bread on the table,” and his rendition of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, which Martí published himself in 1888 (Martí 1991, Vol. 24, 9). Pérez Bonalde’s two primary translations in the 1880s were Heine’s collection Das Buch der Lieder in 1885 and Poe’s “The Raven” in 1887 (J.A. 2: 11–150, 151–157). Apart from a lost translation of Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh that Martí and Pérez Bonalde purportedly co-translated around 1888, Poe is one of the few authors whom both Pérez Bonalde and Martí attempted to translate.6 No evidence suggests that Martí and Pérez Bonalde worked together when translating Poe, but Martí’s writings do point out his awareness of Pérez Bonalde’s translation of “The Raven.” In an 1887 letter that Martí wrote for El Partido Liberal just a month after the release of Pérez Bonalde’s “El cuervo,” Martí names his friend’s translation of the poem and then suggests that “on this same day” there are still older people in Fordham who recall Poe roaming the streets for work while his motherin-law foraged for herbs to make dinner for his struggling family (Martí 1991, Vol. 11, 206). On the surface, Martí’s commentary appears to highlight time since Fordham’s elderly population recalls Poe on the very day that Pérez Bonalde’s translation brings Poe’s most famous poem into Spanish. However, this anecdote actually emphasizes place—the New York locale of the publication of “El cuervo”—since Martí would have no reason to mention what the old people of Fordham currently say about Poe had Pérez Bonalde published his translation in Caracas, Havana, Mexico City, or Buenos Aires.

Pérez Bonalde’s “El cuervo” Pérez Bonalde published his translation of Poe’s “The Raven” as “El cuervo” on April 1, 1887 with numerous illustrations and no paratext other than a prologue written by his Colombian friend Santiago Pérez Triana. Pérez Bonalde’s translation of Poe’s famous poem was not the first into Spanish. That distinction belongs to Mexican man of letters Ignacio Mariscal who signed his 1869 version of “The Raven” in 1867 while conducting diplomatic business in Washington, D.C. Pérez Bonalde’s rendition of the poem is also not the most metrically rigorous version of “The Raven” in Spanish since the 1932 translation by 141

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Argentine poet, scholar, and translator Carlos Obligado more closely approaches Poe’s trochaic octameter than does Pérez Bonalde’s translation. Yet, Pérez Bonalde’s “El cuervo” becomes the version of the poem in Spanish. Regardless of the numerous times that translators have retranslated “The Raven” into Spanish after Pérez Bonalde’s 1887 version, his text remains the most well-known and influential Spanish-language rendition of “The Raven” into the twenty-first century. The unique and rigid form of Poe’s “The Raven” allows any individual stanza to stand in as a microcosm for the poem’s form as a whole. To understand how Pérez Bonalde does and does not bring the form and content of Poe’s “The Raven” into Spanish, I briefly analyse the first stanza of Pérez Bonalde’s “El cuervo” alongside Poe’s source text and the two previously mentioned translations—Mariscal’s and Obligado’s. Then, I explain the immediate and longterm influence of Pérez Bonalde’s translation on Spanish American literary history. To visualize both the form and the content of Poe’s source text and the target texts that I reference, I offer the full first stanzas of each version below. Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore — While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “ ’Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door — Only this and nothing more.” Poe (1845) Reina la media noche: calma fúnebre Se tiende en pos del recio temporal: Cansado al fin de recorrer volúmenes De mi estancia en la triste soledad, Al sueño me rendía, cuando súbito Un sonido me viene á despertar. “Alguien está llamando en el vestíbulo: ¡Importuna visita!” exclamo, “¡bah! Será un necio que venga con farándulas, Un necio y nada mas!” Mariscal (1869, signed 1867) Una fosca media noche, cuando en tristes reflexiones, sobre más de un raro infolio de olvidados cronicones inclinaba soñoliento la cabeza, de repente a mi puerta oí llamar; como si alguien, suavemente, se pusiese con incierta mano tímida a tocar: “¡Es — me dije — una visita que llamando está a mi puerta: eso es todo, y nada más¡” Pérez Bonalde (1964[1887]) Cierta vez que promediaba triste noche, yo evocaba, Fatigado, en viejos libros, las leyendas de otra edad. Ya cejaba, dormitando; cuando allá, con toque blando, Con un roce incierto, débil, a mi puerta oí llamar. 142

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“ —A mi puerta un visitante — murmuré — siento llamar; Eso es todo, y nada más.” Obligado (1932b) Pérez Bonalde’s “El cuervo” delivers the content of Poe’s poem much more than Mariscal’s version and somewhat less than Obligado’s, but what seemed to most fascinate his nineteenthcentury Spanish American readers was his translation’s sound. In the aforementioned prologue, Pérez Triana claims that Pérez Bonalde had performed a “miracle” by taking Poe’s “monosyllabic language” into Spanish—a “polysyllabic” tongue—while re-creating the poem’s “idea” and “cadence and rhythm, in such a way that, without understanding it, an Englishman could recognize the piece if he heard it read well in Spanish” (Pérez Triana 1887). John Eugene Englekirk, the primary authority on Poe’s relationship with Spanish American letters up through the early 1930s, repeats this type of praise. He argues that Pérez Bonalde’s rendition of the poem fits “so well within the metrical confines of the original that a fine reading of the version will betray its identity immediately” (Englekirk 1934, 36–37). These accolades certainly make sense when juxtaposing Pérez Bonalde’s “El cuervo” with Mariscal’s earlier and much looser translation, a version that Englekirk calls “wholly unrecognizable” (Mariscal 1869, 42), but they lose their force when we compare Pérez Bonalde’s text with Obligado’s translation. Obligado’s 1932 version of “The Raven” not only looks more like Poe’s text than Pérez Bonalde’s translation does—on the most basic visual level, Obligado maintains Poe’s sestets and indents the shorter sixth line of every stanza just as Poe does, while Pérez Bonalde uses octets with shorter fourth, sixth, and eighth lines—but it also sounds much more like Poe’s poem because Obligado masterfully re-creates Poe’s trochaic meter and creates an intricate rhyme scheme (using both rhyme and assonance) that differs from but recalls Poe’s. Obligado himself provides the most succinct analysis of the formal elements of his “El cuervo” in a lecture he offered just before his collection of Poe translations went into print. He notes the valor of Pérez Bonalde’s version and then argues that his newer translation is “the only one” that reproduces Poe’s exact metrical structure, “the internal rhyme in the first and third lines,” and the anaphora at the end of the fourth and fifth lines; he also claims that “there was no way to avoid the assonance in the famous refrain” due to the “limited number of useful consonants” in the Spanish phrase “Nunca más” (Obligado 1932a, 82). Although Pérez Bonalde’s metrical pattern does not match the rigor of Obligado’s, his particular rhyme scheme (again, a combination of rhyme and assonance) also recalls Poe’s and maintains certain elements from Poe’s source text that Obligado’s meticulous translation lacks. Pérez Bonalde’s octets follow an AABCDCDc pattern with the fourth and sixth lines ending in rhyme and connecting to the eighth lines via assonance—“llamar,” “tocar,” and “nada más” in his opening stanza. Pérez Bonalde does not re-create the internal rhyme in the first and third lines that Poe offers in his source text and that Obligado follows in his version, but Pérez Bonalde consistently rhymes the last word in each stanza’s third line (the lone “B” in the rhyming pattern above) with the word before the caesura in the middle of each fifth line—in his first stanza, “repente” and “suavemente.” This move provides the reader or listener with a strong visual and/or audible reminder of the similar move in Poe’s “The Raven” in which he rhymes the last word of each third line (which already rhymes internally with the word in the middle of that same line) with the word in the middle of each fourth line (whether the fourth line contains a visible caesura or not). This pattern creates a familiarity with the general sound of Poe’s poem while also maintaining some of “The Raven’s” most unique rhymes. For example, in the sixth stanza, Poe rhymes “window lattice” at the 143

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end of line three with “what thereat is” in the middle of line four. Pérez Bonalde’s translation keeps this rhyme, offering “persiana” at the end of line three and “llana” in the middle of line five, while Obligado’s rhyme scheme loses this particular and very recognizable quirk. In short, Obligado’s translation is more painstaking at the formal level, but Pérez Bonalde’s rendition of “El cuervo” strikes a chord with its readership that no other Spanish-language translation of “The Raven” has since. Obligado’s “El cuervo” is known for its rigor, but Pérez Bonalde’s “El cuervo” was reprinted time and again and is still discussed as the Spanishlanguage version of “The Raven.” This distinction probably relies on context as much as content since Pérez Bonalde released his translation just one year before the Nicaraguan poet and the foremost voice of the Spanish American modernistas, Rubén Darío, published his famous book Azul, giving rise to a new literary aesthetic that many scholars consider Spanish America’s most important contribution to world letters. Darío and the other modernistas read, praised, translated, and made an icon of Poe. The Poe that they loved was Poe the poet—the creator of “The Raven”—and “The Raven” that they read spoke to them in Pérez Bonalde’s rhyme and meter. Pérez Bonalde translated “The Raven” on Poe’s home turf—in the very city where Poe lived when he first published the poem—and like Poe, he sent his bird to fly from New York to the world.

Martí’s Poe fragments Like Pérez Bonalde, Martí also attempted to translate Poe while residing in New York, but unlike his colleague, Martí never published his Poe translations. Instead, he left behind a draft of “Annabel Lee” (Martí 1991, Vol.17, 338–339) and a fragment containing the first five stanzas of “The Raven” (Martí 1991, Vol. 17, 336–337). The stanzas in this fragmented version of “The Raven” do not form a consistent pattern, but the first stanza demonstrates the potential of Martí’s translation had he decided to complete this work: Una medianoche fría, mientras yo triste leía Sobre mucho tomo viejo, tomo añejo años ha, Cabeceando, dormitando, oí de pronto alguien llamando Suavemente, alguien llamando a la puerta de mi hogar; Es sin duda algún amigo, que me viene a visitar: ¡Eso es y nada más!7 Like both Pérez Bonalde’s and Obligado’s translations, Martí’s first stanza creates its own pattern to recall the sound of Poe’s poem while capturing a fair amount of its content. Martí’s stanza resembles Poe’s meter more than Pérez Bonalde’s version, but less than Obligado’s, by offering five lines of octameter and a truncated sixth line. Like the later Argentine translator, Martí also keeps Poe’s sestet, but he offers a stanza with an AbCBBb rhyme and assonance pattern. Martí produces two lines—the first and the third—that do not rhyme with the endings of other lines in the poem, as opposed to Poe’s first line that does not. He also offers more internal rhyme than either Pérez Bonalde or Obligado, nearly mirroring Poe’s usage of internal rhyme in his first, third, and fourth lines by offering “fría” and “leía” in line one and “cabeceando,” “dormitando,” and “llamando” in line three while repeating “llamando” in the middle of line four. Martí rhymes the end of line four with the last word in line five, and he connects the stanza’s second line and final line to that rhyme via assonance with a refrain that resembles those created by Pérez Bonalde and Obligado. This pattern, especially with its usage of internal rhyme, sounds even more like Poe’s “The Raven” than 144

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the cuervos of Pérez Bonalde and Obligado, but the rest of Martí’s draft (along with the fact that the fragment contains only five stanzas) suggests that this sonic resonance would have been difficult to maintain in a translation of the entire poem. The promise offered by Martí’s fragment of “The Raven” begs questions about why he did not finish and publish his translations of Poe and why he tinkered with translating Poe at all. Unlike Pérez Bonalde, whose translations contain no preface or translator’s note to create a context for his readers, Martí wrote introductions or prologues for several of his published translations. The introductions to his first published translation—a Spanish rendition of Victor Hugo’s “Mes fils” (Martí 1991, Vol. 24, 15–18)—to his translation of Conway’s Called Back (Martí 1991, 39–40), and to his translation of Jackson’s Ramona (Martí 1991, 203–205) suggest that Martí translated for one of two reasons: for personal joy and pleasure (Hugo and Jackson) or to make money (Conway). Perhaps he could not fit his translations of Poe into either side of this binary. On the financial side, a translation of “The Raven” would have had to compete with what Martí called the “luxurious prints” (Martí 1991, Vol. 11, 206) of Pérez Bonalde’s “El cuervo,” and the publication of a single short poem like “Annabel Lee” would not have earned him much money. On the joyous side, Poe does not appear to be one of Martí’s preferred writers. He does mention Poe at various times in his collected works, but not nearly as often, as in-depth, or with as much reverence as when he refers to Emerson and Whitman. Martí’s most complex note on Poe in his notebooks reads “Poe. —Personifier of everything abstract. —Great power to personify. —‘Sense swooning into nonsense.’ —‘Fundamental basis, basis in real life, for every poem.’ —‘A realm of his own imagining’” (Martí 1991, Vol. 21, 263). This note, however, demonstrates how one of Martí’s contemporaries, not Martí, read Poe since the three quotations appear in an anonymous 1882 review in The Academy of Andrew Lang’s The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe in which the reviewer critiques Lang for missing out on “Poe’s art of personification” (Lang 1882, 335). Martí’s distanced reading of contemporary Poe scholarship and the reality that he did not publish his translation of “Annabel Lee,” even though no Spanish-language translation of the poem was published before his death in 1895, suggest that Poe caught Martí’s attention, but not enough to cause the Cuban to set aside other projects in order to complete and publish translations of “The Raven” or “Annabel Lee” for his own personal satisfaction. Yet, the very fact that Martí did dabble with Poe translation reveals Poe’s nascent influence on Spanish American writers before Darío and the modernistas consecrated Poe, and it hints at the conversations Martí must have been sharing with Pérez Bonalde and his other colleagues about Poe during their years of exile in New York in the 1880s. Pérez Bonalde and Martí both remain transnational figures in the literary sense, just as Poe does, since their writings find a readership across national borders. Pérez Bonalde’s “El poema al Niagara,” for example, was a well-known poem in Spanish America through the early twentieth century, and his version of “The Raven” is still republished today and still praised as the principal text that brought Poe into the Spanish American literary tradition. The popularity of Martí’s poems endures, and many of his political writings—especially his famous essay “Nuestra América” (Martí 1991, Vol. 6, 15–23)—continue to resonate across the western hemisphere and the globe as both early and passionate calls for Pan-American identity and Latin American solidarity in the face of U.S. aggression. Unlike Poe, however, these poets were also literal transnational figures who left their homelands as exiles. Yet, all three writers cast their lots (literary in the case of Poe, and literary plus political in the cases of Pérez Bonalde and Martí) in the same cosmopolitan space of New York. This city of so many languages spawned Poe’s anaphoric raven, who only repeats “Nevermore,” but it also produced two cuervos—Martí’s who cawed “nada más” in private and Pérez Bonalde’s who 145

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cried “nunca más” to a vast reading public. Poe’s current reputation in Spanish America, a standing as wide and as long-lasting as the shadow that his raven casts in his poem’s final stanza, began with the nineteenth-century translations of that very shadow as hinted at in Martí’s fragment and brought into full realization with Pérez Bonalde’s “El cuervo.”

Notes 1 Poe appears to have started this Greek and Russian rumor himself in an 1841 “Memorandum” that he sent to Rufus Griswold who republished the claim in his entry on Poe in The Poets and Poetry of America in 1842. Other people who wrote about Poe followed suit, both during and after Poe’s life. I would like to thank Jeffrey Savoye of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore for helping me pin down the earliest source containing this romantic but erroneous claim. 2 This Peruvian newspaper published three anonymous rewritings of Poe’s works in April 1847. The first two publications carried the titles “Cuentos de Edgar A. Poe” and offered Spanish-language summaries of Poe’s tales “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” and “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” respectively. The third piece was titled “Cuentos de Edgar A. Poe: El gato negro,” and it provided a summarized version of Poe’s “The Black Cat” in Spanish. This rendition shifts Poe’s famous first-personal confessional narration into the third person. 3 The seriousness with which Baudelaire and the French Symbolists who followed him treated Poe also caused U.S. thinkers to re-evaluate Poe. For example, in his essay “From Poe to Valéry,” T.S. Eliot wonders what the French see in Poe and “become[s] more thoroughly convinced of his importance, of the importance of his work as a whole” after “trying to look at Poe through the eyes of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and most of all Valéry” (Eliot 1966, 219). 4 My approach to translation is most influenced by the early work of James S. Holmes (2000[1972]) and Itamar Even-Zohar (2012[1978]) and the later work of Gideon Toury (2012) and André Lefevere (1992, 2012[1982]). My emphasis on both target and source cultures and texts also resembles the “Göttingen approach” developed in Germany in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Mueller-Vollmer and Irmscher 1998). 5 Due to length constraints, apart from the cited translations of “The Raven,” I offer all other Spanishlanguage texts in translation without reproducing them in Spanish. All of the translations from Spanish into English are my own. 6 Martí refers to his translation of Moore’s poem various times, and he specifically calls it a collaborative work with Pérez Bonalde in an 1888 letter to Enrique Estrázulas (Martí 1991, Vol. 20, 189), but this co-translation was never printed and has never been found. 7 The reproduction of Martí’s draft of “The Raven” as published in Obras completas combines the first two lines of the poem’s second stanza with the first stanza. Leonel-Antonio de la Cuesta notes in Martí, traductor that this “typographic disposition” seems off (1996, 155), and he reproduces those two lines on their own rather than pressing them into the first stanza (1996, 159).

Bibliography “Cuentos de Edgar A. Poe.” El instructor peruano. 21 Apr. 1847. “Cuentos de Edgar A. Poe.” El instructor peruano. 24 Apr. 1847. “Cuentos de Edgar A. Poe: El gato negro.” El instructor peruano. 28 Apr. 1847. Darío, Rubén. Azul. 1888. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1945. De la Cuesta, Leonel-Antonio. Martí, traductor. Salamanca: Universidad Pontifica de Salamanca, 1996. Eliot, T.S. “From Poe to Valéry.” The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Eric W. Carlson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966[1949]. 205–219. Englekirk, John Eugene. Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature. New York: Instituto de las Españas en los Estados Unidos, 1934. Even-Zohar, Itamar. “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem.” The Translation Studies Reader. 3rd Edition. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. New York: Routledge, 2012[1978]. 162–167. Griswold, Rufus Wilmot. “Edgar A. Poe.” The Poets and Poetry of America. 1842. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore.

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Translating Poe in New York in the 1880s Holmes, James S. “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies.” The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. New York: Routledge, 2000[1972]. 172–185. Lang, Andrew. “Review of The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.” The Academy 21. 523 (1882): 35. Lefevere, André. “Mother Courage’s Cucumbers: Text, System and Refraction in a Theory of Literature.” The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd ed. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. New York: Routledge, 2012[1982]. 203–219. Lefevere, André. Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context. New York: MLA, 1992. Mariscal, Ignacio, translator. “‘El cuervo.’ By Edgar Allan Poe.” El Renacimiento: Periodico literario. 2. F. Mexico City: Díaz de León y Santiago White, 1869. 158–160. Martí, José. Obras completas. Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1991. Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt, and Michael Irmscher, eds. Translating Literatures Translating Cultures: New Vistas and Approaches in Literary Studies. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Obligado, Carlos. “Los poemas de Edgar Poe.” Instituto Popular de Conferencias, Buenos Aires 18 (1932a): 67–85. Obligado, Carlos, translator. “‘El cuervo.’ By Edgar Allan Poe.” Los poemas de Edgar Poe: Traducción, prólogo y notas. Trans. and ed. Carlos Obligado. Buenos Aires: Viau y Zona, 1932b. 42–47. Pérez Bonalde, Juan Antonio. J.A. Pérez Bonalde. 2 vols. Ed. Pedro Pablo Paredes. Caracas: Colección Clásicos Venezolanos, 1964. Pérez Triana, Santiago. “Prólogo.” El cuervo por Edgar Allan Poe. Trans. Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde. New York: La América Publishing Co., 1887. Poe, Edgar Allan. “Memorandum.” 29 May 1841. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Raven.” Complete Poems, edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000[1845]. 364–374. Toury, Gideon. Descriptive Translation Studies – and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012.

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13 CONFUCIUS AND AMERICA The moral constitution of statecraft Alfred Hornung

Ezra Pound and Confucius Ezra Pound’s engagement with China is part of his modernistic credo cast in the programmatic motto of “Make It New.” For Pound, there was no doubt that this project of newness would be realized in the field of a cross-cultural basis of poetry. After all, the term poetry derives from the Greek word “ποιεω” [poieo] which means “to make.” The polyglot Pound knew that poetry would be the primary medium for the creation and expression of “newness.” He practiced and proved this poetic pursuit of newness throughout his whole life. Surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, he turned away from his original training in Romance languages and classical education to look for newness in other parts of the world than America and Europe. His break with the Euro-American tradition in search for newness elsewhere eventually led to his evocation of aspects of the Chinese tradition (North 2013). Ezra Pound’s life journey from his birth in the provincial state of Idaho and an incomplete academic education at the University of Pennsylvania on the East Coast to stays in Europe is enhanced by linguistic and cultural journeys into the traditions of Eastern and Western civilizations. Literary scholars are familiar with Ezra Pound’s excursions into the intricacies of the Chinese language by way of Chinese poetry, which I want to review for his engagement with Confucian thought and American politics. Pound’s life-long fascination with the Chinese language and Confucius begins in the early 1910s in London. His first contact with Chinese poetry coincides with his first reading of Confucius. When the widow of the Harvard trained art historian, philosopher, and sociologist Ernest Fenollosa asked Pound in 1913 to edit and publish her late husband’s manuscript The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, he had started reading Confucius’s four classical works in the nineteenth-century French translation of Guillaume Pauthier (1841). Both the editorial work and Confucian thought influenced Pound’s concept of innovative modern poetry and his political career. Fenollosa’s manuscript was the result of a collaboration with his Japanese colleague Kainan Mori during his professorship at Tokyo Imperial University from 1878 on, where he lectured on continental philosophy and sociology. Supported by Mori, Fenollosa, proficient in Japanese, also studied traditional Chinese poetry without a proper knowledge of that language. In his interlinear manuscript, he provided English words underneath each Chinese character without any connectives. Poets praised the scholar’s ideas and English renditions of Chinese 148

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poetry, but sinologists have pointed to the glaring philological deficiencies. In a thorough linguistic analysis, the sinologist George A. Kennedy calls Fenollosa’s essay “a small mass of confusion. Within the limits of forty-four pages [he] gallops determinedly in various directions, tilting at the unoffending windmills” (Kennedy 1958, 25). After the publication of the manuscript, Eastern and Western scholars shifted the critique of Fenollosa’s philological mistakes to Pound and likewise blamed him for misreading the Chinese writing system. R. John Williams argues: Pound and Fenollosa entirely misunderstood the nature of the Chinese writing system, fixating somewhat blindly on its more exotic secondary elements. Pound even thought that Chinese ideography was so pictographically transparent (as opposed to phonetic writing), that one could decipher the characters without even knowing Chinese. (Williams 2009, 150) In support, Williams cites Zhang Longxi’s expertise against seeing the Chinese writing as pictographic or ideographic “because the characters are linguistic signs of concepts and represent sound and meaning of words rather than pictographic representations of things themselves” (Zhang 1999a, 44). Yet, in spite of the linguistic pitfalls, Pound’s interaction with Chinese poetry in his editorial work, substantiated by his simultaneous reading of Confucius, became a turning point in the intercultural relations between the East and the West. Inspired by Fenollosa’s collection of Chinese poems, Ezra Pound engaged in a new concept of translation, which he himself called “re-creation,” critics “creative translation” (see Cheadle 1997, 29) or “translucences” (see Kennedy 2009, 24). In a letter to Iris Barry, he brags in 1916: “Really one DON’T need to know a language. One NEEDS, damn all needs, to know the few hundred words in the few really good poems that any language has in it” (Pound 1950, 93). Hence, his “re-creation” of Chinese poems, published as Cathay in 1915, which Williams considers one of the “modernist scandals” (Williams 2009, 160), takes on a new meaning from the perspective of cross-cultural exchange. In the full title of this first product of a new modern poetry, “Translations by Ezra Pound, For the most Part from the Chinese of Rihaku, From the Notes of the late Ernest Fenollosa, and the Decipherings of the Professors Mori and Ariga,” Pound itemizes the collaborative efforts of Chinese, Japanese, and American poets as well as critics in launching a new poetic program correlating different systems of language and culture. To a certain extent, it corresponds to Zhang Longxi’s idea of translating cultures between China and the West beyond “an overemphasis on difference and cultural uniqueness” or “ethnocentric biases” (Zhang 1999b, 46). Citing several poets and critics, Mary Cheadle claims that Pound’s “uncanny understanding of Chinese poetry … enabled him to see into the essence of the poem with a perspicuity unearned by his limited sinological training” (Cheadle 1997, 46). T.S. Eliot saw his fellow poet as “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time” (Fang 1959[1954], xv). His turn to Chinese poetry became part of the growing interest of Western writers in the visibly different writing systems of Asian literatures and added an important aspect to the emergence of the imagist movement and modern poetry. Equally important for Ezra Pound’s poetic turn to China was his reading of Confucius. Rather than using the nineteenth-century English translation by James Legge available in London in the 1910s, he read Pauthier’s French translation of Confucius’s classics. His fascination with the long tradition of Chinese civilization as distilled in Confucius’s thought represented a double revolutionary aspect in politics and culture. In China, the founders of the First Republic in 1912, which had ended 4,000 years of Chinese dynasties, wanted to 149

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move away from the Chinese imperial history including the legacy of Confucius. Instead, intellectuals and political minds, who—like the first president of the Republic Sun Yat-sen or one of its officials F.T. Song—had attended schools in the United States or England, introduced political and philosophical ideas of Western thinking. Pound met F.T. Song in London in 1914 and arranged for the publication of his article “The Causes and Remedy of the Poverty of China” in The Egoist, in which Song formulated his “attack on Confucianism” (Qian 2009, 131–32; Qian 2003). At the same time, intellectuals and writers in the West discovered the worlds of Eastern philosophies and learning. Hence Pound’s modern position of innovation by way of Chinese poetry and civilization challenges the anti-Confucian stance of Chinese intellectuals and advocates the Western appreciation of Chinese culture. Qian cites Pound’s introductory note to and disapproval with some positions of Song’s article and his cross-cultural statement: “At a time when China has replaced Greece in the intellectual life of so many occidentals, it is interesting to see in what way the occidental ideas are percolating into the orient” (quoted from Poetry and Prose in Qian 2009, 132). Pound’s leading role in the cultural turn from classical western to Chinese sources coincides with his composition of a series of essays, which are later published under the title of MAKE IT NEW (Pound 1935). In these essays, Pound rediscovers poets and traditions from various cultures and times. He is particularly fascinated with poetic forms of the past, medieval poetry of the troubadours in the Provençal language, translations, and the tradition of English literature. These essays also seem to be under the influence of his perception of Chinese ideograms and the long tradition of the Chinese empire (Pound 1935, 7f.; Symons 1987). In Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations, Mary Cheadle traces the different stages of the poet-critic’s engagement with the Chinese philosopher and the Chinese language. Following a first reading in the 1910s and Pound’s disagreement with Chinese intellectuals’ anti-Confucianism, his recognition of the importance of the cultural tradition for newness leads to his second reception of Confucius in the 1920s and his intention to translate the philosopher’s works. In 1928, Mary Cheadle records, Pound “produced only one of the Confucian classics, the Da Xue or Great Learning and, having no facility with the Chinese language, … he simply retranslated Pauthier’s La Grande Etude” (Cheadle 1997, 23). In the mid-1930s, however, Pound started learning Chinese seriously, which on the one hand resulted in the series of Chinese Cantos (LII–LXI), and on the other hand in his later translations of Confucius from the Chinese. When he published his version of The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius in 1954, he was praised by poets Richard Wilbur and I.A. Richards as “the first translator of our age” respectively “Mr. Pound at his best” (Kennedy 1958, 24). The Harvard sinologist Achilles Fang, one of Pound’s linguistic consultants (Cheadle 1997, 50), claimed in the “Introduction” to this volume that “Pound now emerges as a Confucian poet” (Fang 1959[1954], xv). In the 1960s, critics even maintained that these innovations played a fundamental role in the overall development of twentieth-century literature. Donald Davie extends this line of thought: The quality of Chinese poetry is exactly that quality which our poetry, in the present century, has adapted itself specifically to secure. In particular, one of the 20th-century English poetic styles, imagist vers libre, might have been (and partly was) devised deliberately to give the translator from the Chinese just what he wants and needs to function intelligently. (Davie 1965, 704) This cross-cultural interaction essentially contributes to the emergence of modernism and the imagist movement in the 1910s, according to Pound’s programmatic imperative “MAKE IT 150

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NEW.” As part of his return to Confucius and the Chinese tradition in the 1930s he finds the source of this modernist credo on the bathtub of Emperor Tching from the Shang dynasty in the second century BCE and gives it a prominent place in his Chinese Cantos. It is the central theme in Canto LIII (published in 1940; Pound 1957, 274–275). The rendition of Emperor Tching Tang’s rule and his practice of daily renewal expressed in the Chinese characters (xin ri ri xin) is a phrase which Pound found both in Histoire générale de la Chine written by the French Jesuit Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla during his stay in Beijing in the early eighteenth century and in Confucius’s Da Hue, or Great Digest (Cheadle 1997, 226).1 Pound’s purpose in the ten Chinese Cantos, which are all based on de Mailla’s Histoire générale, was the representation of the history of Chinese civilization as a foil for his discussion of the politics of the Early Republic of the United States focused on the role of the second president John Adams in the following ten Cantos (LXII–LXXI). “Make It New” serves as a link between Emperor Tching Tang and President Adams of the new American nation. Since in Canto LIII Pound covers China’s imperial history from the second century BCE to the life of Confucius, the aesthetic credo also takes on a political dimension to be derived from the emperor’s actions and the philosopher’s ideas. After seven years of drought, the emperor cannot end the population famine by financial means when no grain grows. Not money, but only the Emperor’s prayer for rain on the mountain and his new imperative of a daily renewal in line with the supreme deity Chang Ti and the people will restore the balance between heaven and earth. This story is related to the legendary book by Kao-Yao, in which the common people are endowed with great power: “Heaven can see and hear and that through the eyes and ears of the people; heaven rewards the people of virtue and punishes the wicked ones and that through the people” (Qu Wanli 1966, 22).2 Cheadle also stresses such a political reading pointing to Tching Tang’s Shang Dynasty, which replaced the Hsia Dynasty in 1766 (Cheadle 1997, 227). This interpretation of the poem also corresponds to Pound’s political beliefs in the 1930s, his position against capitalism

Figure 13.1 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Faber, 1957) 274–275

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and financial operations and his call for a regeneration of the West, as advanced in his 1937 essay “Immediate Need of Confucius” (Pound 1973, 89–94).

Confucius and the Founding Fathers Confucius’s ideas of order and the proper conduct of leaders in relation to their people have informed Pound’s literary and political career from the 1910s on. In the 1920s he dedicates Canto XIII to this harmonious interaction between the self, the family, and the prince: And Kung said, and wrote on the bo leaves: If a man have not order within him He can not spread order about him; And if a man have not order within him His family will not act with due order; And if the prince have not order within him He can not put order in his dominions. (Pound 1957, 63) This principle of a male authorial hierarchy within an ordered community, unencumbered by any financial obligations, seems to have been the ideal situation which Pound wanted to realize for his own time in the 1930s and which he deduced from his collaborative reading of Chinese civilization and the foundation of the United States of America, based on Confucius. The focus on “MAKE IT NEW” in the 1930s in Canto LIII as well as in the publication of the collection of essays in 1935 and its revolutionary interpretation connects the period of Italian Fascism with Confucianism and the Early Republic in America. The correlation in Pound’s essay of “Jefferson and/or Mussolini” was based—according to Cheadle—on “the Confucian principle of ‘good internal government’ …. For Pound, both Fascism and Confucianism perceived the state—an ethical, economic, social and political totality—as the important context in which to place the individual, the family, and the community” (Cheadle 1997, 83–84). Canto LIII and “MAKE IT NEW” on Emperor Tching Tang’s bathtub is the second of ten Chinese Cantos, which are located between two series of American Cantos (Hornung 1994, 308). The publication of “Eleven New Cantos” (XXXI–XLI) in 1934 represents Pound’s intertextual examination of private and public documents of the Founding Fathers. From the perspective of his Confucian knowledge he uses excerpts from letters and essays by George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren to evaluate the ideas and values involved in the American revolution and the political independence from Great Britain. At the same time, he also points to the exclusion of Indigenous nations and African slaves from the political union and blames the monetary system for negative behavior. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson are privileged and come close to the ideals of Confucian philosophy. Hence George Kearns argues that Pound uses the epistolary quotations from the second and third presidents of the United States “to measure the letters against the teachings of Confucius” and to reveal that “throughout the correspondence” both presidents “are concerned with the precise definition of terms, which lies at the heart of the Confucian ethic” (Kearns 1980, 80). In the comparison of the two presidents, John Adams seems to encapsulate for Pound the ideal of a Confucian leader. The series of the Chinese Cantos (LII–LXI) is immediately followed by the John Adams Cantos (LXII–LXXI) in which Pound actually draws a line between God and 152

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Adams equating the idea of liberty emanating from God with the Congress and the president: “GOD SAVE LIBERTY THE CONGRESS AND ADAMS” printed in caps and a semicircle (Pound 1957, 390). His singular position as a strong leader, who guarantees peace, also distinguishes his politics from that of his successor Jefferson, who favored a native aristocracy, as expressed in his letter to Jefferson: “You fear the one, I the few” (Pound 1957, 429). These political discussions involved in the foundation of the United States reveal the Founding Fathers’ intention to move away from the ruling model of monarchy of their English colonizers and to turn to French and classical sources of political knowledge. Choosing the state form of a republic with a senate obviously evokes the Roman example of government, later substantiated in the classical architecture of the capital Washington, D.C. The rapprochement between America and France, which supported the American cause of independence from England, and the embracement of the political ideas of Enlightenment philosophers for the separation of power in a democracy also created a link to the discovery of Confucius. It is not surprising that Pound knew about the important role of the Jesuits and their role as transcultural mediators between China and Europe, especially France, where their important publications were printed. In Canto LX, Pound situates his description of the Jesuits’ missionary role in China in the seventeenth century between the China Cantos and the Adams Cantos, which implicitly marks the transfer of ideas between the two countries. Yet, it was the work of the American Enlightenment figure Benjamin Franklin, who first made Confucian ideas available to Americans by way of French and English sources. The first encounter of Europeans with Confucius was the work of Jesuits who from the sixteenth century on went to China and gained access to the court and scholars by learning the Chinese language and starting to translate the works of Confucius. First efforts by Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci, who believed that the adaptation of Christianity to Confucianism was the best way of evangelizing China (Meynard 2011, 7), finally resulted in the cooperation of four Jesuits in the seventeenth century who provided the first translation of the Analects in Latin: Confucius Sinarum Philosophus. Sive Sciencia Sinensis (1687). Rather than publishing it in the Jesuit home base of Rome with the support of the Pope, they had it published from the Royal Press in Paris in 1687 under the auspices of the French King Louis XIV “for the highest benefit of the Oriental Mission and of the Republic of Letters” (Meynard 2011, 81). Under the guidance of the Italian Prospero Intorcetta, two Belgians, Philippe Couplet and Francis de Rougement, and the Austrian Christian Herdtrich, who together had spent most of the seventeenth century in China, offered a translation of the works of Confucius, which served both as a manual for Jesuit missionaries and as a basis for the Christianization of China to be undertaken by the French Sun King. The Jesuit scholar Thierry Meynard, SJ, has reproduced this first Confucian translation in 2011 in a multilingual modern edition of Chinese, Latin, and English. In his long introduction, Meynard calls this classic translation of Confucian works an exercise in “cross-cultural hermeneutics” (Meynard 2011, 3). Pointing to the two decisive moments in history in the East and the West, namely the transition between the Ming and Qing Dynasties and the rise of modern China, respectively the discovery of the New World and the Renaissance, he sees in the translation an “interaction between Jesuits and Chinese scholars” and a “discussion between Neo-confucianism and Western philosophy” (Meynard 2011, 26). And he also registers an important change of attitude: … the first generation of Jesuits saw Chinese thought lacking in logic. In contrast to this view, the Sinarum Philosophus attempts to exhibit the logical features of the Confucian classics and to explain them with terms borrowed from Western logics. (Meynard 2011, 54) 153

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This basis of cross-cultural learning seems to inform the age of Enlightenment in Europe and America. The German Enlightenment philosopher, mathematician, and diplomat Georg Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) can serve as an example. His reading of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus prompts his Latin language response Novissima Sinica (Leibniz 1979[1697]). The Newest from China for Leibniz is the report about the official permission to Christianize China, which for him opens a cross-cultural exchange. Not only does he launch in his study the idea of Chinese as a world language and the idea of cosmopolitanism, but he also insists on learning from China, the application of a practical philosophy, and a form of life based on reason (Leibniz 1979[1697], 19). He explicitly spells out this mutual cultural exchange between East and West: Certe talis nostrarum rerum mihi videtur esse conditio gliscentibus in immensum corruptelis, ut propemodum necessarium videatur missionarios Sinensium ad nos mitti, qui Theologiae naturalis usum prxinque nos doceant, quemadmodum nos illis mittimus, qui Theologiam eos doceant revelatam. (Leibniz 1979[1697], 18) In view of the immense rise of moral corruption, the nature of our present conditions seems to make it necessary that missionaries from China are sent to us who can teach us the use and praxis of a natural theology, in the same way in which we send them ours who teach them the revealed theology. (my translation) The progress from the “sinicization of the Jesuits” to the “Sinophilism of the 18th century philosophes” by way of The First Translation of the Confucian Classics is for Donald F. Lach also the silent recognition that the East was more advanced than the West (Lach I 1965, Bk 2, 801; xiii). Hence, it is no surprise that Confucius absorbed the space of “the patron saint of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment” (Reichwein 1925, 77). Benjamin Franklin, who was “the first and foremost American Sinophile” (Aldridge 1993, 25), must have had access to an English version of the Latin text. Jean de la Brune and Louis Cousin provided the first English translation, The morals of Confucius, a Chinese philosopher who flourished above five hundred years before the coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ: being one of the most choicest pieces of learning remaining of that nation, which was published in London by Randal Taylor in 1691. It is interesting that the translators also interpret the Latin title by specifying Confucius’s philosophy as morality and by relating it to Christianity. The correlation of Confucian and Christian ideas for moral conduct became part of Enlightenment thinking which looked for rational explanations. Benjamin Franklin’s reference to America’s religious tradition, which he recalls in the first part of his Autobiography, gradually advances to scientific concepts and the construction of the rational design of Deism. His reception of Confucius’s ideas and the Chinese tradition, in which—according to Max Weber—the belief in a transcendental being did not exist (see Weber 1964[1916]), helps Franklin to make that transition. As early as 1737, he reproduces in two consecutive issues of his journal, The Pennsylvania Gazette, excerpts and summaries from Confucius for his readers. It is unclear what kind of source Franklin used, a partial copy of a London pamphlet The Morals of Confucius, a Chinese philosopher (1691), a translation from a French work, or an abridged translation of the Latin. We also do not know whether Franklin’s summary of Confucius’s ideas is his original or a reprint from another source. What is essential, however, is the fact that the passages reproduced in the journal conformed with the American pragmatic philosopher and 154

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scientist’s model of self-perfection as exemplified in the catalogue of virtues in the second part of his Autobiography written while in Paris for the peace treaty with England in 1784 (Franklin 1964, 149–150). In the first Pennsylvania Gazette coverage, entitled “From the Morals of Confucius,” Franklin focuses precisely on the importance of arriving at virtuous perfection, which the reading of Confucius’s work would help to realize: This Book is, as it were, the Gate through which it is necessary to pass to arrive at the sublimest Wisdom, and most perfect. The philosopher here treats of three considerable Things. 1. Of what we ought to do to cultivate our Minds, and regulate our Manners. 2. Of the Method by which it is necessary to instruct and guide others, And, 3. Of the Care that every one ought to have to tend to the Sovereign Good, to adhere thereunto, and, as I may so say, to repose himself therein. … The great Secret, says Confucius, to acquire true Knowledge, the Knowledge, consequently, worthy of Princes, and the most illustrious Personages, is to cultivate and polish the Reason, which is the Present that we have received from Heaven. (Franklin 1737/8) Franklin’s summary of Confucius’s work at the beginning of his article precisely follows the progress from individual perfection to the care for others and the contribution to the public good. It conforms with Ezra Pound’s perception of Confucius’s belief in the meaningful interaction of the self, the family and the leader in Canto XIII. Early on in his life Franklin decided to pursue the goal of virtuous perfection for which he designed a catalogue of thirteen virtues, which are—as Wang documents—“inspired by The Morals of Confucius” (Wang 2007, 4). In support, Wang proceeds to list Franklin’s thirteen virtues and shows how the American Founding Father reproduced the Chinese philosopher’s previous formulations by quoting the sources in Confucius’s work underneath his own versions (Wang 2007, 2–4). Only virtues 3 “Order” and 11 “Tranquility” are Franklin’s own and do not have a Confucian equivalent. According to Wang’s line of argument Franklin followed “the path for virtuous perfection—from oneself, family to state and the whole empire” as designed by Confucius (Wang 2007, 2). Essential in this concept of virtuous perfection is the self-discipline of all members “carrying out prescribed roles—in an organized, hierarchical system” (Nisbett 2003, 6). Franklin also recognizes that in Confucius’s thought Knowledge and Reason are presents from Heaven for Princes and Illustrious Personages, who need to live by these virtues. For Confucius, Emperor Yoa [sic] is such an exemplary leader who—as Franklin relates— practis’d all these Duties, which have been propos’d by Confucius …. He in a Word, regulated his Love, and all his Passions, according to right Reason. The Prince arriv’d at the Empire 2357 years before Jesus Christ, he Reign’d an Hundred Years; but he Rul’d with so much Prudence and Kindness to his Subjects, that they were the happiest People of the Earth. (Franklin 1737/8) Confucius’s example of Emperor Yao represents for Franklin all leadership qualities required for self-disciplined and morally virtuous politicians in the service of the American people in a rational age. In addition, his example also guarantees the pursuit of happiness as one of the 155

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inalienable rights next to life and liberty with which all human people are endowed by their Creator as laid down in the Declaration of Independence. Both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson affirmed the connection between the practice of virtues and happiness as prefigured in Confucius (see Wang 2014, 14–20). In the same way in which Confucian ideas enter the political documents of the Early Republic, they also become instrumental in their leaders’ moving away both from the corruptive system of monarchical powers in Europe and from the primary religious orientation of the Puritan colonists. To a certain extent, the Founding Fathers of America were motivated by a similar spirit of innovation as the founders of the First Chinese Republic in 1912, following Pound’s Confucian-derived dictum of “MAKE IT NEW.” The Founding Fathers’ repeated references to the prefiguration of Christian beliefs in Confucian moral ideas help to promote the formation of a virtuous statecraft and a mundane society. It allows them to see in the Chinese sage a moral force that takes the place of a Christ figure in Enlightenment America. In this sense, Franklin recommends Confucius to the missionary George Whitefield as an example for a purposeful life in the following letter: I am glad to hear that you have frequent opportunities of preaching among the great. If you can gain them to a good and exemplary life, wonderful changes will follow in the manners of the lower ranks; for, Ad Exemplum Regis, &c. On this principle Confucius, the famous eastern reformer, proceeded. When he saw his country sunk in vice, and wickedness of all kinds triumphant, he applied himself first to the grandees; and having by his doctrine won them to the cause of virtue, the commons followed in multitudes. The mode has a wonderful influence on mankind; and there are numbers that perhaps fear less the being in Hell, than out of the fashion. Our more western reformations began with the ignorant mob; and when numbers of them were gained, interest and party-views drew in the wise and great. Where both methods can be used, reformations are like to be more speedy. (“To George Whitefield” 6 July 1749. Franklin 1961, 383) Thomas Paine went one step further when he compared Confucius to Jesus Christ in “Of the Old and New Testament”: As a book of morals, there are several parts of the New Testament that are good; but they are no other than what had been preached in the Eastern world several hundred years before Christ was born. Confucius, the Chinese philosopher, who lived five hundred years before the time of Christ, says, Acknowledge thy benefits by the return of benefits, but never revenge injuries. (Paine 1794, 140–141) The emergence of Confucius as “the patron saint of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment” tied in with the need of virtuous leaders in a new republic. James Madison, who hung a portrait of Confucius in his Virginia home, reformulated Confucian ideas in his engagement for the Constitution: The aim of every political Constitution is or ought to be first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust. (Madison 1788; see also Wang 2014, 13) 156

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Likewise, Thomas Jefferson embraced these Confucian ideas, moving away from the Puritan legacy of America in favor of “a practical religion that advanced private virtue, such as Confucianism” (Wang 2014, 20). When he became the third president of the United States he reemphasized in his Inaugural Address the application of the Confucian body of thought as a moral force for the well-being of the new American nation (see Jefferson 2006). Furthermore, Collin Wells discovered a Chinese poem from Confucius’s The Book of Odes in Jefferson’s scrapbook that praises Prince Wei as an exemplary leader (Wells 2007, 626; see also Wang 2014, 21–22). Dave Wang, who has researched the connections between Confucianism and America extensively, summarizes: The founders tried to develop good morals to ensure that the democratic system would function in correct direction. They attempted to use Confucian moral philosophy to safeguard the democratic system, build private virtue, and bring up citizens with good morals to serve the new nation. Through the founders’ efforts, Confucian moral philosophy contributed greatly to the formation of the American virtue. (Wang 2014, 23) The philosophical and political interest in Confucianism became part of a general interest in China in Europe, but particularly in the United States. As Dave Wang demonstrates in a series of articles, Chinese knowledge and inventions entered the American public life (see Wang 2007, 2010). Thomas Paine published a series of works about China in the Pennsylvania Magazine based on travel reports by Swedish seamen (Aldridge 1993, 35). Benjamin Franklin’s library in Philadelphia contained the widest selection of books on China and his extensive reading confirmed his belief that China was “the most ancient, and from long Experience the wisest of Nations” (Franklin to Sarah Bache, 26 Jan 1784, unpublished; see also Wang 2010, 151). Wilton S. Dillon summarizes Wang’s findings on China’s influence on the Foundation of America: Confucian philosophy, tea, porcelain, wallpaper, rhubarb, soybeans, house heating, canal and ship building, ideas about reason, rocketry, and alternative medicine, were among the contributions from China. Franklin designed a wooden wall inspired by the Great Wall to protect Philadelphia from Indians after the French and Indian War. Jefferson’s architecture showed hints of Chinese design. (Dillon 2015, 110) In terms of trade, the new American nation also turned away from England and started commerce with China. In 1784, a first ship, aptly named “The Empress of China,” sailed from New York to China to return with the coveted products a year later. The final and publicly visible marker of Confucius’s role for the American nation is his inclusion among the three law givers, who figure on the eastern pediment of the US Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., which was designed by the architect Cass Gilbert and completed in 1935. The sculptor Hermon A. MacNeil chose the Biblical figure of Moses flanked by the Athenian Solon on the left and the Chinese philosopher on the right to represent the three great civilizations that have influenced the United States. At the same time in the 1930s, Ezra Pound had started learning the Chinese language for his renewed interest in Confucius’s works and was composing his Chinese and American Cantos in which he discovered the motto of “Make It New” as the poetic and political imperative of renewal, also the topic in 157

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the published collection of his essays. His return to the long tradition of the Chinese civilization and its apparent influence on the constitution of the First Republic repeats itself in the architectural design of the Supreme Court building in which the interdependence of the three past civilizations and the young American nation is carved in stone for ongoing guidance. This American recognition of the Chinese sage can also be considered a motivation for the Chinese authorities to choose his name for the promotion of Chinese culture in the form of the Confucius Institutes.

Confucius Institutes in the twenty-first century In the “Preface” of the Sinarum Philosophus the Jesuit translators provide a biographical sketch of Confucius and write: “For more than two thousand years, a grateful Chinese posterity has bestowed much honor on its Master, and even more on his works and his teaching” (Meynard 2011, 241). With some minor exceptions, this holds true for most of the Chinese dynasties for whom the Confucian classics represented “a manual for government, addressed mostly to the ruler” (Meynard 2011, 61). The move away from Confucianism in public life seems to be part of a process of modernization and new political orientations in China as well as in America and Europe. In China, the social and economic conditions of Confucius’s life at the end of the slavery period and the beginning of a feudal society contradicted the positions of modern governments and political programs in the twentieth century. The critical biographical evaluation also extended to the body of his works compiled and complemented by his disciples. Hence, the founders of the first Chinese Republic and the progressive republican leaders of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 in Beijing felt that Confucius could not be “revered in an urban-industrial society to the same extent as he was in traditional China’s agricultural society” (Zhang and Schwartz 1997, 206). The adaptation of Western democratic ideas for the constitution of the republic implied a departure from the imperial and philosophical tradition of China, which Pound deplored and counteracted in his poetry and essays. Political reasons also determined Mao Zedong’s classification of Confucius as part of the past to be overcome by the formation of a new Chinese society. In his 1940 essay “On New Democratism” he explains: “Those who worship Confucius and advocate reading the classics of Confucianism stand for old ethics, old rites and old thoughts against the new culture and new thought. … As imperialist culture and semi-feudal culture serve imperialism and the feudal class, they should be eliminated” (quoted in Zhang and Schwartz 1997, 195). This outright rejection of Confucius and his ideas changed in the initial phase of the People’s Republic of China. While denouncing the historical context of the philosopher’s lifetime, Mao Zedong and his Communist Party claimed the traditional allegiance to the political system and loyalty to the leaders for the national identity of the People’s Republic. This ambivalence toward the past, the simultaneous distance from Confucius and acceptance of convenient aspects of Confucianism, constitutes the principle of “critical inheritance” adopted by political leaders before and after the Cultural Revolution (see Zhang and Schwartz 1997). The radical turn against the past between 1966 and 1976 transformed public life despite all forms of the long standing Chinese tradition. It is only in the Opening up and Reform period launched by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s that the practice of a critical inheritance returned which allowed for the appreciation of Confucius as a spiritual force in China and for the sensible reservations about the social conditions in which he lived and when his ideas emerged. Zhang and Schwartz mention two political moments which were instrumental in restoring the legacy of Confucius in contemporary Chinese society. One was the establishment of the Chinese Association of Confucius Study in Qu Fu, which advocated 158

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the rejection of Confucius’s vices and the recognition of his virtues to be “assimilated into the Four Modernizations—industry, agriculture, national defense, science and technology.” The second event was the commemoration of the 2,540th anniversary of Confucius’s birth in 1989 and the official “acceptance of the Confucian tradition” (Zhang and Schwartz 1997, 203). It simply reconfirmed that the Confucian tradition “remains the defining characteristic of Chinese mentality” (Wei-Ming 1991, 136). Both events prepared the way for creating a platform for the promotion of Chinese culture at home and abroad. In the cultural competition between the increasing influence of Western ideas and the preservation of the Chinese tradition the significance of Confucius as a transcultural and transnational figure became a decisive moment. Increasingly the Westernization was accompanied by an Easternization following the Confucian dictum of “correspondence in difference.” The gradual economic rise of China to compete with the economic status of the United States also took on a cultural component. In view of the pervasive presence and availability of American cultural products, like TV series, movies, music, and the possibilities of online communication and games on the Internet, which display in Edward Said’s terminology the powerful impact of cultural imperialism (Said 1993), the Chinese government launched their own programs of cultural messages. Thus, President Hu Jintao started to counteract the dominance of American soft power and proposed a Chinese soft power initiative. The field of cultural diplomacy became a new component of public diplomacy in an effort to promote the Chinese language and culture along with the public perception of China abroad (see Bound et al. 2007). The establishment of cultural institutes for the promotion of language and culture has been part of the political programs of European nations as well as the United States of America for quite some time. As early as 1883 the French created the Alliance Française to promulgate the French language. The British Council, originally called the “British Committee for Relations with Other Countries,” was founded in 1934. Other cultural institutions accompanied the new orientations in the post war situation. In 1953, the United States Information Agency became the official medium of public diplomacy under the auspices of the US Department of State, influential in shaping the public perception of the United States particularly in Europe. While France, England, and the United States coined national designations for their agencies, Germany, Spain, and Portugal resorted to their major poets to name their cultural institutes. The Goethe Institute, following on the former German Academy, started work in 1952 with the original intention to train teachers of German abroad. Spain’s Instituto Cervantes and Portugal’s Instituto Camões joined in 1991 and 1992. In 2007, the European Union National Institutes for Culture was founded, in which all cultural agencies of the European nations are represented. In view of the long tradition and the eminent status of Confucius and Confucianism, reestablished in the Opening up and Reform period, it was a wise decision to use the name of the transcultural and transnational figure of Confucius for the new cultural institutes of China. Zhang and Schwartz quote Gu Mu, member of the State Council of the People’s Republic and nominal head of the Confucius Foundation, to document the philosopher’s official reinstatement in public life. “[I]n his speech to the first meeting of the International Confucian Association on the 2,545th anniversary of Confucius’s birth [Gu Fu] gave expression to the present ‘Confucianism Craze’ … by announcing that Confucius remains not only the Great Presence of China but will be China’s greatest gift to the world” (Zhang and Schwartz 1997, 207; see also Ching 1994, 37). In 2004, the People’s Republic of China started the establishment of Confucius Institutes with a pilot project in Tashkent, quickly followed by one in Seoul in the same year and in Stockholm in 2005, directed by the 159

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prominent sinologist Torbjörn Lodén. More than 600 Confucius Institutes exist, most of them in the United States, 19 in Germany. The Chinese Ministry of Education, which finances these Institutes, hopes to raise the number to 1,000 by the year 2020. This is an important goal commensurate with the global role of the People’s Republic of China. To a certain extent, it recalls and links up with the prominent position of imperial China, which the Jesuits recognized during their missionary work and communicated to Europe and America in their translation of Confucius’s works in the seventeenth century. The model of virtuous education of individuals and leaders, provided by the Chinese philosopher of the fifth century BCE, served for the public leadership role of the Founding Fathers and the formation of the American republic in the eighteenth century and inspired the poetic and political career of Ezra Pound in the twentieth century. It can certainly also be the mission of the Confucius Institutes and become a guideline in our time. The Institutes are run and financed by the Chinese National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language. They often cooperate with local universities and enhance their Sinology departments. Occasional cultural or political differences between China and guest nations or partner universities are part of the process of cross-cultural negotiations, which informed the transcultural hermeneutics of the Jesuit Confucius translations. Such differences of opinions have accompanied the history of the cultural institutions of all nations, including temporary closure. At the same time, the history of cross-cultural relations also shows, that differences can always be resolved. The implementation of the cultural diplomacy by way of Confucius Institutes ties in with President Xi Jinping’s new Silk Road initiative, the One Belt One Road project announced in 2013. The economic program of revitalizing the Chinese trade routes on land and sea, which started in the Han Dynasty (141 BCE) and flourished in the Tang Dynasty (7th–9th century), also enhances transcultural exchange and communication. The common denominator of the political initiative and the realization of Confucius Institutes is the creative use of the Chinese tradition. Ezra Pound’s engagement with Chinese civilization and Confucius brought about a poetic renewal of modern literature and led him to discover the role of Confucius for the European Enlightenment and for the Founding Fathers’ constitution of a new nation. This link between Chinese ideas and the social and moral renewal of nations set in motion further cross-cultural exchanges. R. John Williams points to the example of the Misty Poets, a group of “post-Cultural Revolution Chinese poets who turned to Pound as a radical model for their creation of a new transnational literary tradition” and cites Hong Huang’s “manifesto” in which “he turns … to Ezra Pound’s vision of the Chinese written character as a model for the new Chinese poetry” (Williams 2009, 156–157). Marion Hourdequin starts her comparative analysis of Confucius’s Analects and the co-authored study of American sociologists Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985), with a reference to a lack of moral groundings of existing governments. From Confucius she learns that “the development of a good society begins with the cultivation of the individual virtue. … Through study and ritual practice, the individual brings himself into harmony. Through virtuous engagement with others, the individual brings harmony to social life” (Hourdequin 2010, 371). A similar attention to tradition is necessary for social reform and the renewal of life. “Both the Analects and Habits of the Heart view tradition as essential to maintaining the moral fabric of society” (Hourdequin 2010, 383). Confucius and his advancement of the moral constitution of humankind and of the moral basis of statecraft could serve as ideal transcultural links and promote transnational efforts to “Make it New” based on traditions. 160

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Notes 1 Pound might also have come across this passage in reading Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, in which the transcendentalist writer included a total of nine passages, among them the reference to “Make It New” from his reading of Guillaume Pauthier’s translations of Confucius, which he translated into English rather than using any of the existing English translations in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s library (Thoreau 1971, 88). In “Quotations from the Confucian Books in Walden,” Lyman V. Cady stresses the political reading of this scene and the Confucian idea that rulers have a “mandate of Heaven” and can be replaced if they misuse their power (Cady 1961, 25). See also Hongbo Tan (1993). 2 Translation from the Chinese original by Zheng Chunguang (PhD, Peking University). It differs from the English translation by James Legge: “Heaven hears and sees as our people hear and see; Heaven brightly approves and displays its terrors as our people brightly approve and would awe” (Mueller 1899, 56).

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14 TRANSLATIONS OF AMERICAN CULTURAL POLITICS INTO THE CONTEXT OF POST-WAR JAPAN Hiromi Ochi

Introduction The Cold War culture of the United States has been a focus of scholars since the 1980s with the pioneering concept of “Cold war culture” and “containment culture” proposed by Stephen J. Whitfield and Alan Nadel, which showed how the politics of containment was constitutive of the culture of cold war; the deployment of gender and sexuality as explored in works by Elaine Tyler May, Robert J. Cober, and Robert D’Emilio; and the involvement of institutions including the CIA, the State Department and the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations that provided and disseminated US cultural policies, as documented in the works of Greg Barnhisel, Frances Stonor Saunders and others. And as Christina Klein’s work on Cold War Orientalism exemplifies, the geopolitics of cultural politics has been encompassed in the process.1 Questions of translation are deeply enmeshed in this geopolitics of the cultural politics of the Cold War. Translation was one of the crucial programs of Cold War US-Japan cultural politics. Plans for Japan were initially organized under the umbrella concept of demilitarization and democratization of the former enemy. During the Occupation, which lasted from 1945 to 1952, the Culture, Information and Education (CI&E) section of General Headquarters, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (GHQ/SCAP) provided a cultural program that had a close connection with the program generated by the State Department, and generally the program shared the Department’s cultural policies to disseminate a “full and fair picture” of American democracy (James, Jr. 1963, 77–78). To disseminate ideas attuned to their program in a non-English speaking country, translation constituted a significant part. Seeing the sporadic selection of American books for translation produced by Japanese publishers during the first three years of the occupation, the CI&E section launched a translation program in 1948 to promote the translation of American books of their own selection, and the program continued into the post-treaty years. Working across the linguistic and cultural boundaries, translation was involved in the construction of post-war Japanese culture under the shadow of the United States. As the selection of books was part of the US Cold War cultural politics that was closely connected with the US foreign and military policies and their geopolitics, the planning, selection, translators and translation, distribution, and reception constitute a space for cultural and 164

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political negotiation. The concept of translation includes not only linguistic practices but also, as Meaghan Morris suggests, “the resources people commonly draw on to respond to the effects of economic, social, and cultural change in their lives” (Morris 1997, xviii), and because of such characteristics, translation is also connected with the cultural, political, and thus the institutional. In this sense translation is one of the significant fields of Cold War cultural politics, and as such is an object of scholarly analysis. This chapter explores how translation was involved in the Cold War cultural politics through two cases: institutional promotion of translation of American books into Japanese; and re-representation of Japan through translation of Japanese literary works, especially Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country by Edward Seidensticker.

Promotion of American literature through translation The CI&E established their CI&E libraries (later CI&E Information Libraries, and after the occupation, American Centers) in major Japanese cities, filled with books, magazines and journals selected carefully to fit into the US occupation policies of democratization and demilitarization, in tandem with the Office of International Informational and Cultural Activities of the State Department (“CIE Weekly Reports, Library Division”). To disseminate their books more thoroughly, however, the CI&E eventually developed a systematic translation program in 1948 by providing their own bidding list of books consisting mostly of American works, for there was a linguistic barrier for many Japanese, and even American books that had been translated did not satisfy their purpose of fostering “the obligations and needs of the Japanese people under the Potsdam Declaration” (CIE Bulletin, 26 May, 1948, CIE Bulletin 1949, 13; Hench 2010, 237–249; Ochi 2010, 105–106; Dower 1999, 182). During 1948, the purpose of the selection was in transition from the initial one of demilitarization and democratization to the updated treatment of Japan as a Cold War ally of the United States. Their reason for selecting Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, for example, was that the protagonists were considered model democratic heroes that exemplified individual freedom (Ishihara 2005, 65–66). Animal Farm, though the author was not American, was recommended “with enthusiasm” because it was suitable for people who were “befogged by the utopian claims of authoritarian ideology” (CIE Bulletin 22 June 1949, CIE Bulletin 1949, 7). With the end of the occupation in 1952, the cultural program was transferred to the US Embassy under the auspices of the State Department. In spite of an apparent uneven distribution of power between the two countries, the program was marked by the idea of mutual cooperation. The objective of the program for the post-Peace Treaty era was proposed by John D. Rockefeller III, who had been commissioned to draw up a blueprint by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Deciding to avoid “unilateral” rule by the US, he considered “full and voluntary cooperation from the Japanese” integral to his program (Rockefeller 1951, 2, 7; Matsuda 2007, 113–137). This interchange included the interchange of books in both the original language and in translation along with other cultural products as well as the interchange of scholars, students, and other people. With regard to the translation program, one of the venues that encouraged such “voluntary cooperation” was a monthly magazine, Beisho Dayori (Monthly Review of American Books), first published in March 1953 by the Office of Cultural Exchange at the US Embassy. The magazine was a book guide with the goal of promoting Japanese translation through a list of books considered suitable for translation. The June 1953 issue, for example, featured 19 books, including Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking Press, 1950). The author of the article offers a tentative Japanese title, 165

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introduces its content, and categorizes the book as an educational and scholastic book. The magazine featured essays on translation and contemporary US literature by leading scholars of American literature and also by prominent translators. Beisho Dayori functioned as a channel for the import of American literature as it should be introduced through appropriate selection. The preface of the magazine declared, “it is necessary for both Japan and the United States to have a deep understanding of each other’s culture in order for both countries to work together to realize world peace,” and to achieve this understanding, a systematic, instead of sporadic, selection of American books, especially literature and social science books for translation, was important (“Beisho Dayori Hakko ni Yosete” Preface 1953). Indeed, as a site for constructing the proper “understanding,” leading scholars of American literature and famous translators, such as Katsuji Takamura, KenzaburoOhashi, Masashimi Nishikawa, Naotaro- Tatsunokuchi, Junzaburo- Nishiwaki, Hanako Muraoka, Shiho Sakanishi, and Yasuo Okubo, were commissioned to contribute essays on American literature and ideal ways of selection for translation. In one of such essays, a famous translator, Shiho Sakanishi, complained about the disorganized way of reading American literature by Japanese people, calling it an “unbalanced diet” and recommending Beisho Dayori along with The New York Times and Saturday Review as dependable resources (Sakanishi 1953, 22–24). Nishikawa also deplored the excessive popularity of bestsellers as unsystematic, and underscored the importance of providing an idea of American literature as a whole, and installing a collection of carefully selected literary works (Nishikawa 1955, 29–31). As if presenting that particular collection, those translators whom Katsuji Takamura introduced in his serial article that appeared in numbers 31 to 36 (from October 1955 to March 1956) on translated twentieth-century American literature, heavily overlapped many of the translators of the works he introduced with contributors to the magazine. The introduction of American literary studies was also done in liaison with the Office of Cultural Exchange of the US Embassy. The Japanese publisher Hyo-ronsha published translations of contemporary scholarly books on American literature: The Modern Novel in America by Frederick J. Hoffman (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1951, translated by Katsuji Takamura and Kenzaburo Ohashi as Amerika no Gendai Shosetsu, Tokyo: Hyo-ronsha, 1955), The Short Story in America, 1900–1950 by Ray B. West, Jr. (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952, translated by Naotaro- Tatsunokuchi and Kichinosuke Ohashi as Amerika no Tanpen Shosetsu, Tokyo, Hyoronsha, 1955), An Age of Criticism: 1900–1950 by William Van O’Connor (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952, translated by Masaru Otake and Soichi Minagawa as Hihyo no Jidai: Gendai Amerika no Hihyo Bungaku, Tokyo: Hyo-ronsha, 1955), Achievement in American Poetry, 1900–1950 by Louise Bogan (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1951, translated by Ichiro- Nishizaki and Masao Nagata as Amerika no Gendaishi, Tokyo: Hyo-ronsha, 1957), Highlights of Modern Literature edited by Francis Brown (New York: New American Library, 1954, translated by Katsuji Takamura et al. as Gendai Bungaku no Sho-ten: Eibei Bungaku wo Chu-shintoshite, Tokyo: Hyo-ronsha, 1959), The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling (New York: Viking Press, 1950, translated by Masaru Otake as Bungaku to Seishinbunseki, Tokyo: Hyoronsha, 1959), Fifty Years of American Drama, 1900– 1950 by Alan S. Downer (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1951, translated by Shigehisa Narita and Kuniaki Suenaga as Amerika no Gendaigeki, Tokyo: Hyo-ronsha, 1957), and The Psychological Novel: 1900–1950 by Leon Edel (Philadelphia: Lippingcott, 1955, translated by Naotaro- Tatsunokuchi and Michitomo Takahashi as Gendai Shinri Shosetsu Kenkyu-, Tokyo: Hyoronsha, 1959). All but Trilling’s, Brown’s and Edel’s works were published by a Chicago publishing house, Henry Regnery, known for its publishing of the anti-communist titles of William F. Buckley, Jr., and Russell Kirk. The publishing years of these scholarly books 166

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overlapped with the years when American studies and American literary studies were disseminated through the American Studies Seminar in Tokyo (1950–1956) and Kyoto (1951– 1987) sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Nagano American Literary Seminar (1953–1956) sponsored by the US Embassy. The Hyo-ronsha series also coincided with the formative years of the American Literature Society of Japan, which was eventually established as a nationwide organization by uniting regional organizations in 1962. Interview with Kichinosuke Ohashi and Kenzabuo- Ohashi reveals how American literary scholars in the Tokyo area formed a predecessor of the American Literature Society of Japan. It was the core members that translated the Hyo-ronsha series. Although the two Ohashis did not like the idea of becoming deeply involved in Cold War politics (Tokyo Daigaku Amerika Kenkyu- Shiryou Senta- 1983, 8), to their embarrassment Hyo-ronsha had been granted financial aid by the US Embassy and placed the label “Edited by The American Literature Society of Japan” on their publications (Tokyo Daigaku Amerika Kenkyu- Shiryou Senta- 1983, 17). They also reveal that a 20-volume collection of translated American literature published by the Arechi Publishing House was also made possible by ample financial aid (Tokyo Daigaku Amerika Kenkyu- Shiryou Senta- 1983, 17). Whether individual scholars liked it or not, “voluntary cooperation” was, as it were, institutionally constructed, and canonical works and approaches to American literature were translated and circulated during and after the occupation and were conducive to continued cultural occupation. The body of translated scholarly books helped to construct an imagined community of literary scholars.

Presentation of Kawabata as a Cold War modernist: Translation of Japanese literature If the translation of American literature and literary studies served as a vehicle to incorporate Japanese scholars and readers into the Cold War cultural deployment, translation of Japanese literary works by Kawabata, Tanizaki, Mishima and other contemporary Japanese writers into English and other languages functioned to disseminate Japanese culture that was represented as no longer a bestial enemy but a friendly new ally of the West. The selection of translatable works was contextualized in the deployment of the military, political, economic, and cultural. There was a momentum towards translation of Japanese literary works into English and other languages. In 1951, as a powerful agent of Cold War cultural politics, the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation commissioned Wallace Stegner, a novelist, who had established a creative writing course at Stanford University in 1946, to make a tour as a missionary of “modernist literature” (Bennett 2015, 69). He visited Germany, France, Italy, Egypt, India, Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan, and after the trip his letter was published in one of the Japanese newspapers to promote cultural exchange, encouraging the introduction of Japanese writers to be included in the journal Pacific Spectator published by Stanford University. Mikio Hiramatsu, a famous translator and Japan P.E.N. Club member, who was instrumental in instituting the Japan Society of Translators, contributed an essay to Beisho Dayori to show how Stegner and Yasunari Kawabata, then the 4th president of the Japan P.E. N. Club (serving 1948–1965), functioned as facilitators, or “seeders,” of translation. Responding to Stegner’s appeal, the Japan P.E.N. Club under the leadership of Kawabata established a committee to select representative post-war Japanese short stories suitable for journals like Pacific Spectator and The Western Humanities Review. Stegner also helped Poetry magazine, then edited by Karl Shapiro, to publish a special issue featuring contemporary Japanese poetry (Hiramatsu 1954, 30–32). 167

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The Alfred A. Knopf Japanese literature series beginning in 1955 and the UNESCO Contemporary Works series from 1948 onwards gave momentum to this move. Indeed, both were closely tied together. According to Larry Walker, translation work in the Knopf series was often supported by the UNESCO series, and considering the fact that the United Nations and its headquarters in Manhattan owed much to the Rockefeller Foundation, that translation work was indirectly part of the institution’s cultural program (Walker 2015, 55). Against the backdrop of the development of Japanese studies in the United States that had increased its significance for strategic purposes during World War II, Japanese literary studies flourished after the war, especially at Harvard, Columbia, and Michigan, to which were affiliated Donald Keene, Howard Hibbett, Ivan Morris, and Edward Seidensticker, all of whom were prominent translators of Japanese literature and were involved in these programs. The first books of the Knopf series illustrate the translator-publisher coalition: Jiro- Osaragi’s Kikyo- (Tokyo: Kurakusha, 1949) translated as Homecoming by Brewster Horwitz (intro. Harold Strauss, New York: Knopf, 1955); Junichio- Tanizaki’s Tade Kuu Mushi (Tokyo: Kaizo-sha, 1929) as Some Prefer Nettles by Edward G. Seidensticker (New York: Knopf, 1955); Yukio Mishima’s Shiosai (Tokyo: Shincho-sha, 1954) as The Sound of Waves by Meredith Weatherby (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1956); Eiji Yoshikawa’s Shin Heike Monotatari (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1951) as The Heike Story by Fuki Wooyenaka Uramatsu (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1956); Yasunari Kawabata’s Yukiguni (Tokyo: So-gensha, 1937) as Snow Country by Seidensticker (New York: Knopf, 1956); Mishima’s Kindai No- Gaku Shu- (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1956) as Five Modern No- Plays by Keene (New York: Knopf, 1957); Sho-hei Ooka’s Nobi (Tokyo: So-gensha, 1951) as Fires on the Plain by Morris (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1957); Tanizaki’s Sasameyuki (Tokyo: Chuo- Ko-ron Sha, 1944-48) as The Makioka Sisters by Seidensticker (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1957); Kawabata’s Senbazuru (Tokyo, Chikuma Shobo-, 1952) as Thousand Cranes by Seidensticker (New York: Knopf, 1958); Mishima’s Kinkakuji (Tokyo, Shinchosha: 1956) as The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Morris (New York: Knopf, 1959); Osaragi’s Tabiji (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1953) as The Journey by Morris (New York: Knopf, 1960). Kawabata’s Snow Country showcases the refiguration of Japan and the close connection of cultural politics hooked up with the military, economy, and political complex. The award of the Nobel Prize to Kawabata Yasunari in 1968 can be considered a product of the post-Peace Treaty culture of “mutual cooperation.” In the context of the cultural Cold War, his prizewinning marked an important moment when Japanese culture under the Japan-US Security Treaty (Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan) re-entered a hegemonic negotiation as one of the Western allies. Translation by a Cold Warrior Edward Seidensticker and his New Critical interpretation and presentation of his translation of Snow Country to the world through the Knopf and UNESCO series of literature illustrates how governance and literary form and its reading were implicitly working together in the cultural arena. Seidensticker’s career is the epitome of a cultural Cold Warrior. Having studied Japanese literature and culture at Harvard and entered the State Department, he was sent to SCAP in Tokyo (Seidensticker’s 2002, 35–57). After leaving SCAP, he launched his career as a translator in Tokyo. He was closely affiliated with an international anti-Communist organization, Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), that was secretly sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency and accommodated numerous intellectuals including Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Daniel Bell, Sidney Hooks, Stephen Spender and Allen Tate, and actively promoted Western culture as “free” (Seidensticker’s 2002, 58–108). Seidensticker’s first translation of Japanese literature (short pieces by Osamu Dazai) appeared in 1953 in the first issue of the Encounter 168

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magazine published by the CCF. His first translation of Kawabata appeared in a special issue of Perspectives USA. According to Greg Barnhisel, this magazine, established by James Laughlin (a poet and writer, known for his publishing of modernists including Pound and Williams), was totally in step with the US Cold War cultural policy including the CCF (Barnhisel 2007, 729–754). Laughlin planned a Japanese issue, Perspective JAPAN, and came to Japan, where he talked directly with Seidensticker about translating Japanese literary works in that issue. The result was an abridged version of “The Izu Dancer” along with a piece by Tanizaki Junichiro (Seidensticker’s 2002, 112–113).2 Kawabata’s Snow Country fits into the framework of what Christina Klein calls Cold War Orientalism: a burgeoning of middle-brow, popular cultural products concerning Asia, ranging from popular movies such as The King and I (1956) and Sayonara (1957) to the media in such magazines as Saturday Review and Reader’s Digest, as well as the Voice of America radio station. It flourished against the backdrop of US Cold War policies including those of the National Security Council (NSC) and the State Department that aimed at extending the front line of European containment to Asia. NSC policy papers series 48 in particular laid out “the position of the United States with respect to Asia” (“NSC48/1,” in Etzold and Gaddis 1978, 252; Klein 2003, 126–27) and strategies to help build a noncommunist Asia, and carefully ruled out any possible behaviour by the US which would “be subject to the charge of using the Asiatic nations to further United States ambitions” (“NSC48/2,” in Etzold and Gaddis 1978, 270). Those cultural items constructed a cultural arena where ideologies generating such policies could be not only accepted but also contested and negotiated (Klein 2003, 6–7). NSC48/1 describes Japan as a country that the United States would “support against external aggression” without “the appearance that its policies in Japan” were “dictated solely by considerations of strategic self-interest” (“NSC48/1,” in Etzold and Gaddis 252), and accordingly, as Nahoko Shibusawa points out, representation of Japan was changed from that of a brutal samurai to a feminized, subservient woman who needed protection: in other words, a geisha. Feminine or familial representation of Japan helped to replace the former image of a belligerent nation with the renewed image of an obedient political ally deserving of US protection and instruction (Shibusawa 2006, 4–7). Indeed, Japan’s alliance with the US and other Western countries led to being regarded as a partner or member of “an international family,” whether it was a military, political, or economic one (Hilgenberg, Jr. 1993, 113). It was during this prevalence of “geisha” and the subservient image of Japan that Kawabata’s works were introduced to the Western allies. Unlike Madama Butterfly and Sayonara, Snow Country was not a romance between an American man and a subservient Japanese girl but a love affair between a Japanese man from Tokyo and a Japanese geisha in the countryside. Whether the author Kawabata and the translator Seidensticker were conscious of it or not, however, Snow Country had peculiar narrative devices to induce readers to see it as a Cold War Orientalist romance. The story opens with the scene of a train going through a long tunnel, a channel to another country. The train carries the urban dilettante male protagonist Shimamura, who is much influenced by Western culture and has even translated French books. Sometimes when he senses that he has lost his honesty he goes into the mountains, and his attachment to the local geisha Komako is considered by the narrator as an extension of “his response to the mountains” (Kawabata 1956, 19). Komako is a person who could give Shimamura a sense of lifelike nature. He does not want to bridge or overcome the gap in social class between him and the geisha, or rather he longs for something remote precisely because he cannot acquire it. That is why he feels he must leave her when he is 169

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really close to her. Like the formula of a Madama Butterfly-like story, Shimamura later leaves the girl and returns to Tokyo through the tunnel, where the girl’s voice is “already a distant one that could do no more than sharpen the poignancy of travel” (Kawabata 1956, 86). By going through the ritual of entering and leaving another country, and also owing to the unbridgeable gap in social status between the urban man and the outcaste girl, the world of Snow Country serves as if it were a foreign country, safe from the danger of the mingling of two different social classes. The reader identifies with the narrator of Snow Country who shares Shimamura’s view, and this viewpoint makes the remote country beyond the tunnel a strange and foreign location where the traveller can find a subservient geisha and leave her safely, thus objectifying, eroticizing, and romanticizing the region and the girl together. When Western readers identify themselves with the narrator, the remote country has an intensified strangeness and foreignness that entices the Orientalist’s gaze. The representative middle-brow magazine Saturday Review acknowledged the story as “an experience.” The reader “will find he has lived in that cold, snowy air, seen the landscape…spent the night with the geishas” (Bowers 1957, 15). The San Francisco Chronicle book review saw it as a “vignette of Oriental decadence, beautifully presented” (“Book Review” 1957, 19). But with no more than its reception as a middle-brow cultural product and without the high-brow interpretation of the artistry of Kawabata, it would have been impossible for Kawabata to be awarded the Nobel Prize. In addition to his affiliation with these Cold War cultural organs, Seidensticker shared the “apolitical” lexicon of the Cold War liberal critics, such as “irony,” “paradox,” or “detachment.” In an article featured in Perspective JAPAN along with “The Izu Dancer,” Seidensticker denounces proletarian literature as political and praises Kawabata’s indifference to politics (Seidensticker 1955, 169). Especially in his analysis of Snow Country, which appeared in the journal Freedom, published by the Japanese branch of the CCF, Seidensticker’s contention that juxtapositions of totally different images such as the depiction of the heroine Komako’s beautiful lips as “leeches” (Kawabata 1956, 32) generate new imagery by an original combination of beauty and ugliness reminds us of the New Critics’ evaluation of the metaphysical poets’ conceits. “As American New Critics tend to argue,” he says, “if paradox is the essential part of art, Kawabata’s work has, at the bottom of it, a very serious and a peculiarly Japanese paradox, which constitutes the essence of his art” (Seidensticker 1962, 104–105). Above all, when he says that Kawabata’s “detached attitude toward his characters” distinguishes him from traditional Japanese novels under the influence of “Western literary techniques” (Seidensticker 1962, 107), which specifically refers to the techniques of 1920s’ and 1930s’ naturalism and proletarian literature, Seidensticker labels Kawabata as a genuine Japanese modern novelist distinguished from naturalist and proletarian literature paradoxically by applying New Criticism. In this way, the literary space of Snow Country, the other Japan, or as Seiji Lippit suggests, an “ahistorical realm separated from modernity” (Lippit 2002, 156), was made into a truly modernist space by his New Critical rhetoric. In this sense, Kawabata and his “Japan” is a Cold War cultural product of depoliticized Cold War liberal literary criticism, including Metaphysical Criticism of contemporary Japan and New Criticism and its canon that travelled across the Pacific. Kawabata’s creation of the other Japan is made more foreign by Seidensticker’s translation, as he selected aptly what would accommodate both high-brow criticism and middle-brow criticism of the Cold War era. The politico-cultural space of the NSC 48 mindset constituted a systematic understanding of Kawabata’s literary space. The understanding by middle-brow cultural institutions of a mythical and authentic Japan wherein resided subservient geisha girls, and the understanding of the works as an authentic Japanese modernist literary space by highbrow cultural institutions including Seidensticker—both of these created Kawabata’s 170

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reputation, like Faulkner’s, in the Cold War cultural arena and thus appropriated this mystic, other Japan as a cultural ally of the United States. It is worth noting that Seidensticker’s introduction to Snow Country was written in consultation with Kawabata and Strauss, and he rewrote part of it to make it clear that the vague relation between Yoko and Komako is just that, something implicit that is just implicated (Seidensticker 1956, ix; Walker 2015, 89). As Walker shows, the final product Snow Country was produced “through their elaborations” that circumscribed the range of interpretation, and to help its success Donald Keene favourably reviewed the book in the New York Herald Tribune (Keene 1957, 8; Walker 2015, 89). It was the year after Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato endorsed the policy of the three non-nuclear principles and thus totally brought Japan under the protection of the US nuclear umbrella that Kawabata was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The implicit idea that underpins these cases is what Naoki Sakai calls “homolingual address” that “assumes the normalcy of reciprocal and transparent communication in a homogeneous medium” (Sakai 1997, 8), or the institutional translation is, as it were, a project to performatively assume a politico-cultural space of homolingual address. Translated literary works constituted a space of negotiation with an uneven power balance, a formative cultural space for generating a model minority in the post-war complex of the political, economic, and military.

Note 1 See, for example Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Boston: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990); Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narrative, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families and the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books 1988); Robert J. Cober, In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, & American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000); Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Penny von Eschen, Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). 2 For more detailed description of Seidensticker and Kawabata as Cold Warriors in their political positions and aesthetics, see Ochi (2014). As Michael K. Bourdaghs, Cécile Sakai, and Toeda Hirokazu point out the significance of an approach to Kawabata and Seidensticker in the context of the Cold War (Bourdaghs et al. 2018, 2–11).

Bibliography Barnhisel, Greg. “Perspectives USA and the Cultural Cold War: Modernism in Service of the State.” Modernism/Modernity 14.4 (2007): 729–754. “Beisho Dayori Hakko ni Yosete (Preface).” Beisho Dayori (Monthly Review of American Books) 1(1953): 1. Bennett, Eric. Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015. “Book Review.” San Francisco Chronicle (Jan. 16, 1957): 19. Bourdaghs, Michael K., Cécile Sakai and Toeda Hirokazu. “Introduction: Kawabata Yasunari in the Twenty-first Century.” Japan Forum 30:1 (2018): 2–11. Bowers, Faubion. “A Lonely World.” Saturday Review (Jan. 5,1957): 14–15. CIE Bulletin. May 26, 1948. NARA II, College Park, MD: RG 331 SCAP UD 1653 Box 5172. CIE Bulletin. June 22, 1949. NARA II, College Park, MD: RG 331 SCAP UD 1653 Box 5172.

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Hiromi Ochi “CIE Weekly Reports, Library Division”. 24 February–2 March 1946. NARA II College Park MD: RG 331 SCAP UD 1651 Box 5117. Dower, John. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. Etzold, Thomas H., and John Lewis Gaddis, eds., Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945–1950. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Hench, John B. Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Hilgenberg Jr., James F. From Enemy to Ally: Japan, the American Business Press, & the Early Cold War. New York: University Press of America, 1993. Hiramatsu, Mikio. “Nihonbungaku no Kaigaishinshutu to Stegner shi (Introduction of Japanese Literature to Foreign Countries and Mr. Stegner).” Beishodayori (Monthly Review of American Books) 16 (1954): 30–32. Ishihara, Tsuyoshi. Mark Twain in Japan: The Cultural Reception of an American Icon. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005. James, Jr., Henry. “The Role of the Information Library in the United States International Information Program.” The Library Quarterly 23. 2 (1963): 75–114. Kawabata, Yasunari. Snow Country. Trans. Edward Seidensticker. New York: Knopf, 1956. Keene, Donald. “Snow Country.” New York Herald Tribune Book Review 13 January (1957): 8. Klein, Christina. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Lippit, Seiji M. Topographies of Japanese Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Matsuda, Takeshi. Soft Power And Its Perils: U.S. Cultural Policy in Early Postwar Japan and Permanent Dependency. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Morris, Meaghan. “Forward.” Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997. ix–xxii. Nishikawa, Masami. “Hitotsuno Kibo-” (A Hope). Beisho Dayori (Monthly Review of American Books) 25 (1955): 29–31. Ochi, Hiromi. “Democratic Bookshelf: American Libraries in Occupied Japan.” Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War. Eds. Greg Barnhisel and Catherine Turner. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. 94–100. Ochi, Hiromi. “Kawabata to Yukiguni no Hakken—Nichibei Anpo Joyaku no Kasa no Moto de (Kawabata and Discovery of ‘Snow Country’: Under the Umbrella of Security Treaty between the U.S. and Japan).” Nihon Hyosho no Chiseigaku (Geopolitics of Representation of Japan). Ed. Fuhito Endo. Tokyo: Sairyusha, 2014. 251–284. Rockefeller, John D., III. “Report to Ambassador Dulles, Third Draft April 6, 1951” NARA II, College Park, MD: RG59 Central Decimal File 1950–54 Box 2534, 1951. Sakai, Naoki. Translations and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997. Sakanishi, Shiho. “Honto- ni Shirutoiukoto” (What It is about Really Knowing Something). Beishodayori (Monthly Review of American Books) 5 (1953): 22–24. Seidensticker, Edward. “Modern Japanese Literature: Two Views of the Novel.” Perspective of Japan: An Atlantic Supplement. Atlantic 195:1 (January 1955): 168–169. Seidensticker, Edward. “Introduction.” Snow Country. Trans. Edward Sendensticker. New York: Knopf, 1956. Seidensticker, Edward. “Gendai Sakkaron (3) Kawabata Yasunari” (Modern Japanese Writers (3) Yasunari Kawabata) Trans. Sho-ichi Saeki. Jiyu- (Freedom). Dec. 1962: 100–110. Seidensticker, Edward. Tokyo Central: A Memoir. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002. Shibusawa, Naoko. America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Tokyo Daigaku Amerika Kenkyu- Shiryou Senta- (The Center for American Studies, Tokyo University). “Interview with Kichinosuke Ohashi and Kenzabuo- Ohashi” American Studies in Japan Oral History Series 21. The Center for American Studies, Tokyo University, 1983. Walker, Larry. “Unbinding the Japanese Novel in English Translation: The Alfred Knopf Program, 1955– 1977.” Diss. U of Helsinki, 2015.

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15 A MIXED LEGACY Chinoiserie and Japonisme in Onoto Watanna’s A Japanese Nightingale* Yoshiko Uzawa

Introduction Onoto Watanna (1875–1954), through her exotic romances, was a popular “Japanese” writer of her day. Born Winnifred Eaton to a Chinese mother and an Anglo-Irish father, she grew up in a working-class family in Montreal, Canada. She came to the United States via Jamaica in the late 1890s, and further crossed national, cultural, and class boundaries by assuming a new identity as an Anglo-Japanese author of high breeding.1 The Japan Craze, or Japonisme was then in fashion on both sides of the Atlantic. Against the backdrop of the cosmopolitan craze for all “things Japanese,” A Japanese Nightingale (Watanna 1901), her second novel featuring a mysterious Eurasian geisha of exquisite talent and beauty, was a phenomenal success. The illustrator Genjiro Yeto’s Japanese name and exotic page decorations helped to authenticate the author and her book (Larkin 2000, 8–31; Matsukawa 2005, 39–40). It sold more than two hundred thousand copies, and was adapted into a stage drama in 1903, and eventually a Hollywood film of the same title in 1918.2 Watanna’s ethnic masquerade and her subsequent literary success have intrigued scholars for the past three decades. Having little first-hand knowledge on Japanese customs and culture, she learned about her fictional home country by reading Japan-related books and articles. She was an ardent reader, and as Dominika Ferens, Jean Lee Cole, Yuko Matsukawa, and others have persuasively argued, Watanna’s Japanese romances were informed by a variety of other texts and voices; such as cultural tourism, dialect literature, and popular Orientalist stories and dramas, including John Luther Long’s Madame Butterfly and Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. 3 As a matter of fact, Madame Butterfly and A Japanese Nightingale had so much in common that their authors bitterly accused each other of plagiarism in 1903.4 Revising the American-male-Orientalist story of Madame Butterfly through a “Japanese” woman’s viewpoint was what Watanna surely had in mind in writing her story. But that does not necessarily mean her Nightingale was just another Butterfly. What other texts and what other stories did she use in creating A Japanese Nightingale? Was not her romance as multi-cultural as her authorial persona? This essay explores hitherto neglected sources of hybridity in this author’s fabrication of Japan. Drawing on her early writings and A Japanese Nightingale in particular, I will examine how creatively, albeit eclectically, Watanna combines diverse materials from different trends of Orientalism to recreate her imaginary Japan. 173

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Willow pattern scenery In February 1907, Onoto Watanna published in The Eclectic Magazine an article entitled “The Japanese in America.” By the time the essay appeared in the magazine, she had already produced as many as seven popular “Japanese” romance books from major publishing houses in Chicago and New York. “The Japanese in America” was her rebuttal against the anti-Japanese white nativist racism growing rampant on a large scale down the West Coast in the 1900s. The Asiatic Exclusion League was formed in San Francisco in 1905; the San Francisco school controversy occurred in 1906; and the anti-Asian Vancouver Riot would soon break out. The early 1900s thus marked the beginning of violent racial antagonism toward Japanese immigrants, which was a natural continuation of the anti-Chinese sentiment that had begun several decades earlier. Despite the title of the article, Watanna strategically places her Eurasian mixed-race heritage beyond the dichotomy of Oriental vs. Occidental: I am not Oriental or Occidental either, but Eurasian. I must bleed for both my nations. I am Irish more than English—Chinese as well as Japanese. Both my fatherland and my motherland have been the victims of injustice and oppression. (Watanna 2003, 177; emphasis added) She uses the language of literary romance even in this supposedly political argument. This was the first and last time that Watanna ever admitted to her Chinese ancestry in public, though metaphorically under the umbrella term of “Eurasian.” In order to understand the full implication of her being “Eurasian,” we must make a careful analysis of the romantic world she constructed in the novel, A Japanese Nightingale. A Japanese Nightingale is the story of an interracial relationship between a Eurasian girl named Yuki (“snowflake”) and a Caucasian American young man named Jack Bigelow. Girl meets boy (not the other way around), and they marry, break up, and are finally reunited, despite the girl’s brother Taro Burton, who is a stern opponent to such a non-sanctified union. Yet simply using two British-Japanese Eurasians as two out of three main protagonists of the story does not make a unique Eurasian romance. Instead, the ways in which the romance copies some characteristic designs from other Euro-American-Orientalist trends to create a quaint, picturesque, and yet still freshly readable Japan make this narrative a genuinely interesting Eurasian text. Watanna incorporates two plots of hybrid romance from different Orientalist traditions: the willow pattern from British chinoiserie and the Japanese folktale Urashima from Japanologists’ writings. To use Watanna’s metaphors, she chooses the former from her “fatherland” and the latter from her adopted “motherland,” and let them love and clash, before they are united in an “Irish more than English—Chinese as well as Japanese” way. Watanna thus contrives her signature narrative in A Japanese Nightingale, whose intertwining of ethno-cultural components requires further analysis. The willow pattern of British chinoiserie is an elaborate decorative pattern used on ceramic plates and other dinnerware. Representing an imaginative British interpretation of Chinese aesthetic gardens, it has become one of the most ubiquitous, popular “exotic” commodities since the late eighteenth century. The whole picture of China in the willow pattern is a pure invention. Yet its origins being forgotten over the course of many years, it has come to represent the real China in the British art and mind. In an endearing passage

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from the preface to the landmark study Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay, the author Hugh Honour gives the willow pattern a very personal context: All of the objects [in the willow pattern] induced in my childish mind a distinct picture of China—a topsy-turvy land of brilliant flowers, weird monsters, and fragile buildings where most European values were reversed. And even when, years later, I discovered that they had all been made in Europe, the original impression remained at the back of my mind. (Honour 1961, 2) The pattern traditionally contains a set of symbolic icons arranged in sequence: a willow tree in the center, a Chinese mansion on the right, a river, a moon bridge, a love boat, an island, and the two turtledoves at the top of the plate. Moreover, the willow pattern has a tragic love story. To read it, we start with the Chinese mansion on the right and move clockwise; through the round bridge, the boat, the island, finally to the turtledoves. It is the story of a daughter disobeying her rich father’s choice of husband for her. It is also a love story across social class lines, for she marries a poor young man whom she loves dearly and elopes with him. The story ends with the death of the lovers and their post mortem transformations into the pair of turtledoves, a symbol of eternal love.5 Plotwise, the willow pattern story and A Japanese Nightingale have distinct similarities: both are love stories that cross social divides, both feature a gentle but rebellious daughter as a heroine, and both end with vows of eternal love. Their parallelism does not stop there. Reading Nightingale, we notice that it is the willow pattern that gives this romance a characteristic narrative style. A Japanese Nightingale actually starts with passages adorned with the willow pattern icons: The last rays of sunset were tingeing the land, lingering in splendor above the bay…. Out in the bay that the sun had left was a tiny island, and on this a Japanese business man, who must also have been an artist, had built a teahouse and laid out a garden. Such an island! In the sorcerous moonlight, one might easily believe it the witchwork of an Oriental Merlin. Running in every direction were narrow jinrikisha roads, which crossed bewildering little creeks, spanned by entrancing bridges. These were round and high, and curved in the center…. After crossing a bridge shaped thus, a straight bridge is forever an outrage to the eye and sense. (Watanna 1901, 1–2; emphases added) A set of willow pattern objects characterizes the scenery. There is a mysterious “island” in a bay, with narrow jinrikisha roads and “little creeks” spanned by “entrancing bridges.” The Japanese rich businessman and artist who built in this romantic site the gorgeous “teahouse,” equivalent to the Chinese mansion of the willow pattern, is called “an Oriental Merlin.” Given that the English Arthurian legends allegedly originated in Celtic mythologies, the allusion to the great wizard of this English-Irish legend is, therefore, suggestive of this island being a “fatherland” in more ways than one. Intriguingly, the nameless narrator pays special attention to the shape of the round bridge, claiming that after “crossing a bridge shaped thus, a straight bridge is forever an outrage to the eye and sense.” This explicit reference to its round shape can be read as a textual call for the reader to cross the bridge, blending East and West; and more specifically, it is a call to decipher the fictional Japanese bridge as a synecdoche, a reference to the imaginary moon bridge of the BritishChinese willow pattern.6 175

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More interestingly, it is the willow pattern that gives this romance a moment of “Chinese box” structure. Chinese boxes are a set of boxes, decorated with the same pattern and decreasing in size, so that each box fits inside of the other. As a literary term, it is used to describe the structure of stories within stories often found in the self-reflexive novel (Abrams and Harpham 2015, 304). One instance is when the two men, Taro and Jack, come to the Burton family mansion called “the Palace” in search of Yuki: They saw the dim outlines of the old palace before them, with its wide balconies and sloping roofs. Half-way up the garden was the family pond, freshened by a hidden spring, and the little winding brook which would hither and thither showed how it emptied into the bay beyond. There was even a tiny boat moored on a toylike island in the center of the pond…. Here it was that he [Taro] and Yuki had grown up together. The little boat was the same, the island as small and neat, the house seemed as ever; nothing has changed. Yes, there was Yuki! A deep groan slipped from his lips. (Watanna 1901, 148–149) The willow pattern in this scene repeats itself in different phases. It appears 1) in the depictions of the scenery of the old palace in the garden; 2) in Taro’s childhood memory of the same old palace in the garden in the past; and 3) in the descriptions of the miniature island in the pond, which seems to replicate the island in the water in the opening scene of the novel. The repetition of the patterned scenery in this way seems to help produce a feeling of (spatial and emotional) depth without sacrificing narrative coherency in the story. We finally find the willow trees, surrounding the tiny lake in the garden, in this Palace scene. They are called “weeping-willows.” As the raindrops fall from the boughs, they make a “mournful sound.” They are literally willows that “weep” (in both senses of the term: to droop and to sob). Hearing their weeping, the text reads: “Taro groaned again.” Twice he hears the willows weeping and twice he moans for the loss of his childhood paradise. The coordination between Taro groaning and the trees weeping is suggestive of the pattern’s having an orna/mental design. The weeping willow pattern enables Taro to show his innermost feelings that remain otherwise inexpressive. As we have seen thus far, A Japanese Nightingale is a coded romance whose first language is the British-Chinese willow pattern. Accentuating its sameness in different places, the willow pattern provides a series of evocative stage settings of distinct characteristics for the “Japanese” story.

Japonisme à la mode When accused of plagiarism in 1903, Watanna made an interesting comment in a newspaper interview, saying that she was in search of a “style”: “Naturally, when I decided to enter the literary world, I wanted to adopt a style of work that might be considered characteristic, and to labor in a field that was not overcrowded. Where could I turn for more interesting copy than my native country?”7 A Japanese Nightingale was Watanna’s “signature work” in the sense that it was, metaphorically speaking, her stylebook of popular literary Japonisme whose style samples she fearlessly collected. Yuki, the Nightingale, is undoubtedly a product of literary Japonisme. Like Madame Chrysanthème and Madame Butterfly, she is another mysterious young woman entangled in an East-West marriage (musumé), whose exotic unknowability at once vexes and allures the 176

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reader in and out of the story. In fact, Yuki’s personal background, not to mention her true intentions of working as a geisha and of marrying Jack, is kept hidden till the 13th chapter (of 18 chapters) reveals them. More significantly, however, Yuki looks mysterious because she is a woman of picturesque beauty, often compared to mercurial weather. She is a talented performer, and her signature performance named “Storm Dance” shows, more than anything else, what we might call her meteorological glamour. When a shaft of intense light pours in, and exotic music accompanies it, Yuki, in a white kimono, sways to and fro: Her garments seemed endowed with life, and took on a sorrowing appearance; the lights changed to accompany her; the music sobbed and quivered. It had begun to rain! She was raining! It seemed almost as if the pitter-patter of her feet were the falling of tiny raindrops; the sadness of her garments had increased, and now they seemed to be weeping, at first gradually, then faster and still faster, until finally she was a storm—a dark, blowing, shot down in quick, sharp flashes, the drums clashed madly, the koto wept on, and the samisen shrieked vindictively. Suddenly the storm quieted down and ceased. A blue light flung itself against the now lightly swaying figure; then the seven colors of the spectrum flashed on her at once. She spread her garments wide; they fluttered about her in a large half-circle, and, underneath the rainbow of the gown, a girl’s face, of exquisite beauty, smiled and dropped. Then the extinction of light—and she was gone. (Watanna 1901, 4–6) In this stunning performance, Yuki transforms herself into a series of natural phenomena, becoming even “ethereal, divinely so.” After watching her show, there is neither East nor West but a “common cry of admiration and wonder” from “Japanese and foreigners alike” (Watanna 1901, 6). Yuki’s staged drama crosses East-West cultural boundaries in its cosmopolitan appeal. Her performance is dazzling, and so is the language describing it. In exclamations of wonder, the text states: “It had begun to rain! She was raining!” Language fails to demarcate borders between what is and what is not, inviting multiple interpretations of this feminine art of impersonation. Plotwise, this is to portray Yuki as femininity per se, in the evanescence of “snowflakes,” which is her name in Japanese, changeability (as is represented in a sequence of her performance, from rain to rainbow), and her ability to transform into something other than herself. Her staged incarnation seems to go both ways: more (than) human and less (than) human. She is at once a goddess incarnate and an exotic and possibly erotic geisha idol. As the American theatrical manager exclaims: “She’d be a great card in vaudeville. There is a fortune in her!” (Watanna 1901, 10). She has enormous commodity value as an exotic in the marketplace. In Watanna’s time the American Arts and Crafts movement reached its zenith, and Japanese ukiyo-e was one of its main sources of influence. Americans were captivated by the “symbolism and grammar of ornament in Japanese art” (Hosley 1990, 50) and absorbed Japanese decorative vocabularies and motifs to form their taste. Among the Japanese motifs incorporated into American art and designs were such natural images as flowers (morning glory, ume, cheery, peony, chrysanthemum, azalea, lotus, iris), birds (crane and stork were most ubiquitous), meteorological phenomena (wind, rain, snow, wave, cracked ice, lightning, moonlight), fish and sea creatures (wild carp, crab, lobster, tortoise), and insects (butterfly, dragonfly, black fly, spider and its web).8 From the viewpoints of these decorative motifs, Yuki’s storm dance can be seen as shorthand for “Japanese” or “Japonisme” artwork in motion. 177

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The text maintains that the storm dance is Yuki’s original: She “learned the arts of the geisha; later she invented dances and songs of her own, and soon she was able to command a good price at one of the chief tea-gardens in Tokyo” (Watanna 1901, 158). And yet her dance is more French and/or “expatriate American” by replicating Loie Fuller’s dance performances. Born in Illinois, and raised in Chicago, Fuller did not have much of a dancing career while she was in the United States. It was in Paris that her Serpentine Dance, which improved on skirt dances like the can-can, attracted serious public attention. Art Nouveau and Impressionist artists loved and admired her, calling her “Art Nouveau in motion.” In 1900 at the Paris Exposition Universelle, Fuller built her own theater and enjoyed her mounting international fame as the expatriate American creative dancer-cum-choreographer. Being an able producer, she invited the Japanese performers Otojiro Kawakami and Madame Sadayakko to play at her theatre between her shows. Putting on her stage costumes of long and baggy white silk garments, under the special effects of colored electric stage lighting, Fuller transformed herself into a variety of images on stage. Fire, cloud, moss, flower, rainbow, and serpent were the names of her dance repertoire.9 La Loie’s simulations of natural phenomena and her effective use of multi-color lighting are the very features that Watanna copies for her Eurasian heroine’s allegedly original dancing number. In this captivating performance of Yuki’s textual dancing where metaphors dominate, everything is just everything else. The rhetoric of personification animates the inanimate, giving birth to a weeping koto (a Japanese zither), a metonymy for the heroine who is also musical and habitually tearful. In her first book of Japanese romance, Miss Numè of Japan (Watanna 1899), Watanna also uses “Koto” as the name of a faithful Japanese servant. In her early years, Watanna named these textual second-fiddles “Koto” as her fictional avatars. This weeping koto was possibly an avatar of the author Onoto Watanna, who invented “Kotoko Takahashi” as her fictional “true name” and circulated it among Japanese readers in America. The May 1899 issue of the San Francisco Japanese Newspaper Shinsekai (The New World), edited and published by the Japanese journalist Hachiro Soejima, reported that “Kotoko Takahashi” was the true name of the Japanese-English author Onoto Watanna, a new-wave female writer of Japanese descent. The tone of the article is generally in her favor. Although she did not receive a higher education, her innate talent as a writer is evident in her first novel Miss Numè of Japan, which was published three months ago and sold two thousand copies in its first two weeks. If I may be frank, the structure of the novel as a whole appears more American than Japanese. I can see how much effort she makes in her novel to describe Japanese characteristics, feelings, manners and customs, which she often misrepresents. Given that she has been in America ever since she was eight years old, her Japan at the back of her mind must be very vague. Therefore, she is not to be blamed for many factual mistakes she makes due to her limited knowledge of Japanese culture. Her work nonetheless contains some serious turns of events, charming novel ideas and sharp understandings of the world. We should appreciate her vigorous writing.10 This sympathetic rendering of the young Eurasian author’s lack of knowledge as a result of her long estrangement from her native country might reflect a concern that the Japanese Issei (the first generation) held for their future generations in the United States. If that is the case, Watanna’s advent as a Japanese authoress in America is welcomed by the author of this article not just despite but because of her being “Japanese” even with little knowledge of Japan. 178

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Retelling Urashima For Watanna who could not read Japanese, English translations and adaptations of Japanese literature must have been invaluable. The story of the young fisherman Urashima Taro is one of the oldest endearing Japanese folk stories. In the 1880s and 1890s, the Urashima legend was rendered into English by William George Aston, Basil Hall Chamberlain, Lafcadio Hearn, and other Japanologists and Japanophiles. The availability of this legend in English language, with its deity-human (marital) relationship being its central theme, the folk tale of Urashima was of special significance for Watanna and her Nightingale, because it provided her with another “authentic” Japanese story appropriate for her hybrid romance. Watanna read Hearn’s “The Dream of a Summer Day” (1895), a half-autobiographical and half-travelogue essay, which contained a retelling of the tale of Urashima. And through Hearn’s text, she somehow knew (at least the existence of) Chamberlain’s prose adaptation written for children. Hearn had consulted different sources in preparation for his retelling of the legend, and among them was Chamberlain’s prose adaptation The Fisher-boy Urashima (1886).11 Chamberlain’s was a small crepe book, colorfully decorated by the Japanese ukiyo-e painter Eitaku Kobayashi. It was published by the innovative Japanese publisher Takejiro Hasegawa as the eighth volume in the “Japanese Fairy-Tale Series.” With this little colorful gem before him, Hearn wrote his “Dream of a Summer Day,” saying “I shall try to tell the legend over again in my own words” (Hearn 1895, 4). Though different in details and tones, these nineteenth-century English renditions generally followed the basic storylines of the Japanese old variants of eighth century, letting Otohime (a goddess) and Taro (a young fisherman) marry to live happily in the sea palace and having Taro die of sudden extreme senility after his return to his homeland.12 The name “Urashima” appears twice in A Japanese Nightingale, first in Yuki’s fear of abandonment, and then in Taro Burton’s paradisiacal childhood memories. Each reference significantly differs from each other in its emphasis, revealing multi-layered meanings that the legend takes on in Watanna’s work. Yuki reads the story of Urashima from the viewpoint of his deserted bride. When her little jade bracelet is broken, Yuki takes it as a bad omen and wonders if something disastrous might happen to her marriage: Perhaps he [Jack] would soon pass away from her, and, like the ghost of the fisherboy Urashima, who had left his fairy bride to return to his people, he too would pass out of her life, back into that from which he had come (Watanna 1901, 120) In short, she fears to be an Otohime, abandoned by her husband. This tragedy of the deserted wife that Yuki reads into the Urashima legend apparently has a thing in common with the story of Madame Butterfly. In A Japanese Nightingale, however, what she calls the “sorrows of love” will happen in unexpected ways: Yuki’s leaving her husband, which is to be triggered by her brother’s coming back home from America after a prolonged absence. An Urashima Taro is a “Rip Van Winkle.” His long absence makes him outdated and not well up in the actual situation. In A Japanese Nightingale, Taro Burton (who shares his first name Taro with the fisherman of the legend) most deserves the appellation. Taro, away at Harvard, keeps tapping his now poor family for money and ends up sacrificing his sister. In a scene in which the three main protagonists finally meet, the ghost of the fisher-boy Urashima casts a deadly shadow over Taro Burton. Finding out that his best friend’s Japanese wife is 179

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none other than his beloved sister, the text reads: Taro “aged all in a moment” (Watanna 1901, 153). Unable to take her non-Christian marriage except as prostitution, Taro, before long, dies in despair. In stark contrast to these tragic images, the story of Urashima embodies a paradise (“where Summer never dies”) in Taro Burton’s childhood memories. The phrase “where Summer never dies” is a direct quotation from Hearn’s “Dream of a Summer Day.” In Hearn’s text, it is the Sea God’s Daughter (Otohime) who uses this phrase. She proposes Urashima Taro to marry her and live happily together at her father’s palace, which she describes as the place “where summer never dies” (Hearn 1901, 6). In the same way, Yuki uses the phrase to tell her brother to keep on sailing the boat and telling her the story of the fisher-boy Urashima. Taro remembers: … how they [Taro & Yuki] would drift around in their tiny boat, and she, little autocrat, would perch before him, her eyes dancing and shining, while he told her the story of the fisher-boy Urashima and his bride, the daughter of the dragon king. And when he would finish, for the hundredth time, perhaps, she would say, “See, Taro-sama, I am the princess, and you the fisher-boy. We are sailing, sailing, sailing on the sea ‘where Summer never dies,’” and he, to please her, around and around the little pond, until the sun began to sink in the west and the little mother would call them in-doors. (Watanna 1901, 152; emphasis added) Taro Burton treasures the legend of Urashima in his childhood memories, because it was little Yuki’s favorite fairytale; and because they were much closer to each other in her childish play of pretending to be the fairy princess to her brother’s fisher-boy Urashima. Therefore, he was eager to “please her.” And yet more importantly, by sharing the story with his sister, Taro was trying to help her understand their parents’ interracial marriage without letting her step into the reality of racial prejudices against Eurasian children like them. Their English missionary father and Japanese aristocratic mother had a lawful Christian marriage. But that scarcely changed the fact that the siblings grew up socially isolated as the “halfcastes.” As Taro remembers, “Japanese children used to laugh at their hair and eyes, calling them “Kirishitans’ (Christians)” (Watanna 1901, 150). It was by means of re/telling of the Japanese hybrid romance Urashima that Taro romanticized their parents’ interracial relationship to protect his sister from prejudicial Japanese society. Hearn in his essay treasures the Urashima legend because he thinks himself an Urashima Taro who has abandoned “her,” his fairy mistress on the island of never-ending summer. By retelling the legend, he enacts his own guilty feelings toward his Greek mother: Who was the Daughter of the Dragon King? Where was the island of unending summer? … I have memory of a place and a magical time in which the Sun and the Moon were larger and brighter than now…. And all that country and time were softly ruled by One who thought only of ways to make me happy…. But I never returned. And the years went; and one day I knew that I had lost the charm, and had become ridiculously old. (Hearn 1895, 20–21) Hearn-Urashima does not die but becomes “ridiculously old” (Hearn 1895, 21), whereas the fisher-boy Urashima in Hearn’s retelling of the legend meets his tragic end “crushed by the weight of four hundred winters” (Hearn 1895, 11). Inspired by Hearn’s text, Watanna too 180

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employs two Urashima Taros. While Taro Burton passes away, Jack Bigelow lives on and is finally reunited with Yuki at the end of a year of his “pilgrimage of love.” Apparently, it may seem too easy an ending. In the final scene of reunion, Yuki and Jack exchange their marriage vows. It is not a Christian marriage since she rejects his proposal to be wedded “till death do us part.” Instead, she offers marriage of “our peasant folk”: “‘We are wedded for ever an’ ever.’ ‘Yes, forever,’ he repeated” (Watanna 1901, 226). These are the marriage vows of eternal love we find in the willow pattern love story. Watanna’s romance ends in grafting the Japanese folk story by way of its English adaptations onto the willow tree pattern of British-Chinese chinoiserie. A Japanese Nightingale is a culturally hybrid, “Eurasian” romance. And, as this chapter demonstrates, it is her creative, yet nonetheless eclectic, borrowings that make her book a truly fascinating read. One might claim that Onoto Watanna was able to survive because of the scarcity of real Japanese authors in the United States around the turn into the twentieth century. But one could also claim that she was still successful, in her time, because she was in hand of good stories of different cultural backgrounds and willing to make a fabulous bricolage out of them. She was not “ethnically Japanese,” and her choice of identity as a Eurasian author of Japanese descent may be part of her ill-adjusted identities, but the fact that she could attain such acclaim and strike a chord in so many readers in the United States shows how Watanna’s literary Japonisme of transnational lineages can serve as a witness, a snapshot, of her endeavors to understand what she was and where she stood.

Notes * This chapter is based on my presentation at the 48th International Conference of the American Studies Association of Korea in Seoul on 2 November 2013. I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Ceol-U Jang (Hansung University) and the audience participants at the conference for their insightful questions and comments. Professor Yuko Matsukawa (Seijo University) has kindly read the manuscript of this chapter and made many useful suggestions and perceptive comments, for which I am most grateful. 1 The two books resourceful for Onoto Watanna’s biographical information are her anonymouslypublished autobiography (Watanna 1915) and Birchall (2001). 2 Watanna did not take part in writing scripts for these adaptations, and both adaptations were unsuccessful. See Birchall (2001, 68, 74–76). 3 See Ferens (2002); Cole (2002); Matsukawa (2005, 40–45); Honey and Cole (2002, 1–21). 4 Honey and Cole (2002, 11). In the outset of her career Watanna experienced a couple of plagiarism scandals. She accused the theatrical producer David Belasco of plagiarizing her work, and also was accused by the poet John Van Cleve of stealing his poem. For further information, see Birchall (2001, 79–81, 87–90). 5 Regarding the willow pattern and its narratives, see Chang (2010, 86–87); Tohda (2008, 34–37). 6 It is also likely that Watanna had in mind an actual Japanese drum bridge while writing A Japanese Nightingale. There was an arched bridge in the “Japanese Village & Tea Garden” built for the California Midwinter International Exposition held in the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in 1894. Newspapers and magazines reported so enthusiastically about the Midwinter World Fair that it would be strange if Watanna, the earnest collector of “things Japanese,” did not know this garden at all. Regarding the “Japanese Village” in the California Midwinter International Exposition, see California Midwinter International Exposition (1894, 115). After the San Francisco Japanese Tea Garden, the drum bridge became one of the most exotic and photographed architectures of Japanese gardens in the United States. See, for example, Li (2013). 7 “Jap Artist Sees ‘A Japanese Nightingale’,” New York Sunday Telegraph, November 29, 1903. Cited in Birchall (2001, 84). 8 See Hosley (1990, 50–51). Miss Moonlight, the heroine of Watanna’s (1912) The Honorable Miss Moonlight is also a Eurasian geisha cum dance choreographer, and her original dance is called “The Spider,” another decorative motif linked with Japanese art. See Watanna (1912, 7).

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As for the American dancer Loie Fuller and her dance performances, see Current and Current (1997, 120– 144). Regarding the Kawakami troupe at Fuller’s theatre in Paris, see Anderson (2011, vol.1, 485–498). 10 “Eibei shousetsuka takahashi kotoko joshi [The English-American authoress Miss Kotoko Takahashi],” Shinsekai, 18–19 May 1899. A news clipping from Winnifred Eaton Reeve Fonds, Special Collections, University of Calgary Library. My translation. 11 Hearn also referred to Aston’s prose translation and Chamberlain’s pose and verse adaptations of the legend of Urashima verse in the Manyoshu (the first anthology of poems compiled in the eighth century). See Hearn (1895, 3–4). 12 Miura Yusuke classifies the story of Urashima variants into three groups, each of which reflects stylistic differences: 1) the old variants of eighth century (of a deity-human marriage with an ending of Urashima’s death), 2) the illustrated short stories (Otogi-zo-shi) popular in medieval and early modern periods (with an additional element of Taro’s being rewarded for his kind conduct), and 3) the modern variants (without sex nor death) of early twentieth century, revised for elementary school textbooks and children’s literature. For further information on the historical changes of the Urashima legend, see Miura (1998).

Bibliography Abrams, M.H., and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms, 11th ed, Stamford, Connecticut: Cengage Learning, 2015. Anderson, Joseph L. Enter a Samurai: Kawakami Otojiro- and Japanese Theatre in the West, 2 vol. Tucson, Arizona: Wheatmark, 2011. Birchall, Diana. Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. California Midwinter International Exposition San Francisco, California. Official Guide to The California Midwinter Exposition in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. San Francisco: G. Spaulding & Co., 1894. http s://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/010882564. Chang, Elizabeth Hope. Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics: In Nineteenth-Century Britain. California: Stanford University Press, 2010. Cole, Jean Lee. The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Current, Richard Nelson, and Marcia Ewing Current. Loie Fuller: Goddess of Light. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997. “Eibei shousetsuka takahashi kotoko joshi” [The English-American authoress Miss Kotoko Takahashi]. Shinsekai, May 18–19, 1899. In Winnifred Eaton Reeve Fonds, Special Collections, University of Calgary Library. Ferens, Dominika. Edith & Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Hearn, Lafcadio. “The Dream of a Summer Day.” “Out of the East”: Reveries and Studies in New Japan. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1895. 1–27. Honey, Maureen, and Jean LeeCole. Introduction. Madame Butterfly and A Japanese Nightingale: Two Orientalist Texts. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002. 1–21. Honour, Hugh. Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay. London: John Murray, 1961. Hosley, William. The Japan Idea: Art and Life in Victorian America. Hartford, Connecticut: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1990. Larkin, Susan G. “Genjiro Yeto: Between Japan and Japanism.” Greenwich History 5 (2000): 8–31. Li, T. June, ed. One Hundred Years in the Huntington’s Japanese Garden: Harmony with Nature. San Marino, California: Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, 2013. Matsukawa, Yuko. “Onoto Watanna’s Japanese Collaborators and Commentators.” The Japanese Journal of American Studies 16 (2005): 31–53. Miura, Yusuke. Urashima taro no bungakushi [The Literary History of Urashima Taro]. Tokyo: Goryu Shoin, 1998. Tohda, Masahiro. Yanagi moyo no sekaishi: Daiei teikoku to chugoku no genei. [The Global History of the Willow Pattern: Great Britain and the Imaginary China]. Tokyo: Taishukan Shoten, 2008. Watanna, Onoto. Miss Numè of Japan: A Japanese-American Romance. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1899. Watanna, Onoto. A Japanese Nightingale. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1901. Watanna, Onoto. The Honorable Miss Moonlight. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1912. Watanna, Onoto. Me: A Book of Remembrance. New York: Century, 1915. Watanna, Onoto. “The Japanese in America.” “A Half-Caste” and Other Writings. Eds. Linda Trinh Moser and Elizabeth Rooney. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. 173–177.

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16 GENDER AND TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES Sarah Ruffing Robbins

Introduction What does it mean, in practice, to “gender” Transnational American Studies? And, conversely, what does the study of gender gain through sustained dialogue with Transnational American Studies? Whether we view gender and transnationalism as themselves fields of study, or as tools for doing analyses of American culture (broadly conceived), the growing trend to situate these terms relationally is bringing important intellectual benefits. One pathway for highlighting this evolving process is to consider the history of each term as a keyword often employed in multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary cultural studies. In arguing for this linkage as worthwhile (even, perhaps, crucial) to American Studies, a look back to Raymond Williams’s groundbreaking Keywords and its various heirs is instructive. “Gender” (Williams 1983[1976]) is not included either in Williams’s original 1970s’ keywords list or in his 1980s’ update. (Williams does treat “Sex,” though not as “sexuality” would typically be described now in relation to the field of Gender Studies.) Alan Durant’s 2008 Critical Quarterly essay contextualizes the decision-making driving Williams’s original selection of terms as an artifact with 1950s–1960s’ roots (Durant 2008, 123). To illuminate the contingent—and necessarily evolving—nature of such lists, Durant also re-issues Williams’s call within the Keywords volumes of 1976 and 1983 for readers to view blank pages there as invitations to “‘amendments, corrections and additions’” (quoted in Durant 2008, 122). Durant himself describes an experiment with attendees at a 2007 seminar in Cambridge, UK, where ten participants were asked to identify ten items from Williams’s work to delete and ten new terms to add. Intriguingly, neither “gender” nor “sexuality” emerged from this exercise as a necessary addition (Durant 2008, 141). However, “gender,” as well as “sexuality,” did appear in the 2005 revised edition of Keywords under the editorship of Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris (Bennett et al. 2005). “Transnationalism” is not, however, on these editors’ list of new entries, nor did it emerge from Durant’s experiment with collective list-making, though globalization had by this time claimed a spot for both adjudicatory groups. Intriguingly, in fact, Durant used the example of “globalisation” and “geopolitical changes” such as “British decolonisation, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and global warming” to illustrate how large-scale social change leads new terms to claim keyword status (Durant 2008, 126). This 183

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gradual incorporation of both gender and globalism (which we might view as a precursor to transnationalism) should therefore remind us that, if keywords themselves come and go, linkages like the one envisioned in this very essay are, also, contingent in the long run, no matter how crucial they may seem at a given moment. As I write this essay, both “gender” and “transnationalism” seem relatively safely ensconced in the American Studies lexicon, so proposing possibilities for connecting them becomes a logical next step. Indeed, right now, in our early twenty-first century time frame, gender and transnationalism seem eminently harmonious in a shared capacity to productively support American Studies. Here’s one case in point. Julian Wolfrey’s Critical Keywords in Literary and Cultural Theory (2004) offered a detailed gloss identifying major themes in Gender Studies, such as the impact of gender ideology, distinctions between gender and sex, and the need for scholarship to address connections between patriarchy and power. Wolfrey’s presentation also emphasized the contested and unstable nature of gender. These traits fell clearly in line with American Studies’ growing resistance to received narratives from that field’s prior history, such as the myth of US exceptionalism, as well as with the rejection of stable geographic boundaries for “America.” Influential voices in that chorus had been assembled, for instance, in the essay collection, The Futures of American Studies, edited by Robyn Wiegman and Donald E. Pease (2002). This trend in American Studies to extend “America” outward beyond the US has been illustrated more recently through projects like Camilla Fojas and Rudy P. Guevara’s edited volume, Transnational Crossroads: Remapping the Americas and the Pacific (2012), along with the launch of the online Journal of Transnational American Studies and the growing but over-due visibility of American Studies programs offered outside the US. In gender studies, calls from scholars like Inderpal Grewal have offered parallel resources for redefining that field’s landscape of inquiry, including Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (2005) and the textbook Grewal co-authored with Caren Kaplan, An Introduction to Women’s Studies: Gender in a Transnational World (2002). Thus, at the same time that Gender Studies was increasingly complicating its foundational themes so as to examine the fluidity of gender and sexuality, and re-positioning the field in a global context, so too was American Studies. Affirming these compatible views of gender and transnationalism, the Keywords for American Cultural Studies (edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (2007)) included Lisa Lowe’s treatment of “Globalization” and an ambitious treatment of “Gender” by Judith Halberstam. Lowe’s sweeping review of cultural critics’ engagement with globalization as a generative keyword wove in multiple examples of its interaction with gender to analyse important social phenomena, including the shift from a US-situated, male-gendered manufacturing workforce to more transnational female service industries; recalibrations of US identity mythology away from idealized visions of rural manhood and geopolitical dominance through post-World War II power; and the rise of transnational feminism linked to human rights movements. On a parallel track, Halberstam’s (2007) essay, while underscoring multi-disciplinary approaches to gender studies, explicitly acknowledged trends in gender research as influenced by global perspectives. Overall, we can see that American Studies, in line with its self-reflexive, expansive, and interdisciplinary nature, has been connecting trends in gender analysis with the movement to situate the previously-US-focused field transnationally. A comparable development is evident in disciplinary-oriented explications of the work Gender Studies should be doing now. Oliver Janz’s and Daniel Schönpflug’s Gender History in a Transnational Perspective (2014) asserts that “Historians the world over have accepted the challenges of a new global perspective on women’s and gender history,” even while recognizing that “global networks, exchanges and interdependencies are not recent phenomena” 184

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(Janz and Schönpflug 2014, 1). That is, essays in the Janz/Schönpflug collection distinguish between the relatively recent scholarly commitment to transnationalism and actual historical experiences of gendered actors operating transnationally, a not-new phenomenon they see as having been under-examined for too long. As part of a stance advocating for transnational Gender Studies, Janz and Schönpflug’s “Introduction” takes up such questions as the difference between “international” and “transnational,” terms they distinguish by viewing the former as (primarily) involving official governmental units and the latter as focusing on more informal social networks (Janz and Schönpflug 2014, 2). They see transnational work as involving experiences potentially forming networks, movements, and spaces of interaction to “bridge boundaries” and develop new “rules and … specific features that cannot be traced back to their national origins” (Janz and Schönpflug 2014, 2). Therefore, although their collection frames its exploration of gender and transnationalism around the particular discipline of history, Gender History in a Transnational Perspective contributes to the trend of linking the two frameworks. Similarly, a special 2016 issue of the Gender and History journal presents a cluster of essays examining how historical research’s empirical and theoretical interpretations are viewing gender formation as an interactive social process resisting fixed binaries and borders such as the nation. Consistent with the gender work outlined above, this special issue also affirms important goals such as complicating previously overgeneralized terms like “women’s” as a category of analysis. Further, in an indication that American Studies’ increasing conjunction of analytical points like transnationalism with gender has become a frequent practice for Gender Studies itself, the introductory overview by Shireen Hassim salutes essays by Anna Krylova, Mary Louise Roberts, Linda Gordon, and Lynn Thomas for productively pairing gender with another concept (in their case, agency, intersectionality, binarity, and crisis). Given such approaches appearing in multiple academic areas, we should note how individual projects from multiple disciplines are explicitly linking “gender” and “transnationalism” in their research designs from the outset. Catherine Nolin’s Transnational Ruptures: Gender and Forced Migration (2006) exemplifies this strategy by using a gender lens to challenge assumptions about immigrants’ responses to their new homes, both during and after migration. Nolin’s project draws on her background in human/cultural geography and on her commitment to feminist activism in tracking women refugees’ moves from Guatemala to Canada. Her book’s focus on two American spaces outside the US signals its affiliation with a more literal form of Transnational American Studies. Her use of gender to showcase women migrants’ distinctive experiences—such as the social networks they join during stages ranging from emigration itself to maintaining homeland connections—affirms Nolin’s commitment to combining the two lenses. Migration and associated cross-cultural experiences, in fact, have been among the most productive topics for researchers yoking Gender Studies with transnationalism in American Studies. Patricia R. Pessar and Sarah J. Mahler have retraced a growing prevalence of gender as a lens for studying transnational migration back to the 1970s, when they say such research arose in a limited way, to increased attention in the 1980s (though with over-emphasis on quantitative data-gathering over multi-faceted analysis), to their own efforts to promote a more theoretically informed approach in the 1990s (culminating in a special issues of the journal Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power). By 2003, their essay on “Transnational Migration: Bringing Gender In” for The International Migration Review (Pessar and Mahler 2003) could point to multiple strands of emerging scholarship, such as connecting studies of gender and migration to other transnational social trends, creating more longitudinal projects, adding in more studies of children, and focusing on geographic areas beyond the Americas. 185

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Indeed, as both an actual experience evident in today’s media-saturated cultural landscape and a ready metaphor inviting theorizing, migration now serves as a generative nexus for such research. And gendered mobility need not involve a permanent relocation in order to illuminate meaningful transnational cultural exchange. Some projects, such as Nolin’s referenced above, still concentrate on gendered subjects seeking a permanent new home somewhere in the Americas. But the profile of Kato Shidzué (or Baroness Shidzué Ishimoto) in Karen Kuo’s East is West and West is East (2012) takes a different tack focused on cultural transfer by examining the impact of Ishimoto’s meeting activists Margaret Sanger, Mary Beard, and Agnes Smedley during travel to the US and the Japanese woman’s subsequent campaigns against nationalism and industrialization’s abuse of female workers back in Asia. On the more literary side of American Studies that blends a nod to its “myth and symbol” heritage with an embrace of comparative transnationalism, Juanita Heredia has juxtaposed narratives by two authors chronicling connections between gender and border-crossing identity formation. Overlaying gender and transnationalism to read their narratives, Heredia’s content analysis situates Chicana author Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo and Peruvian-American writer Marie Arana’s American Chica comparatively (2007). Heredia’s intercultural reading reveals similarities around transnational gender identity formation that can be traced alongside distinctions linked to genealogy, ethnicity, and place-based differences. Taken together, projects like Nolin’s, Kuo’s, and Heredia’s embody an American Studies attuned to both gender and transnational contexts of experience—including addressing the intellectual tensions still operating at their conjunction. In line with such research, a number of other studies capitalize on one of the central concepts in feminist thought today—intersectionality. For example, consistent with intersectionality’s calls to highlight race, ethnicity and social class differences to resist overgeneralization, studies of gender in a transnational American Studies context are employing such strategies as comparative geographic analysis and attention to generational differences. Accordingly, in his essay for Diaspora, Augusto Espiritu drew careful distinctions between the lives of Carlos Bulosan and Carlos P. Romulo and between typical representations of their careers as depicted in Asian American Studies (Espiritu 2003). Critiquing a gendered ideology of “hero construction” tied to expectations for a male immigrant leader, Espiritu sought “to enlarge the conceptual categories” framing these two different figures “by interpreting their lives and texts from the perspective of reciprocity, gender, and performance” (Espiritu 2003, 363). For Espiritu, the longstanding elevation of Bulosan exemplifies, in part, the rhetorical construction of an immigrant hero, whereas the virtual erasure of Romulo reflects the impact of multiple differences in their backgrounds, including their political perspectives and their social class identities. Along related lines, in my own work for one chapter of Managing Literacy, Mothering America (Robbins 2006[2004]) on the US missionary Laura Haygood’s life in China across multiple decades, and in a later series of collaborative studies of Nellie Arnott’s early twentieth-century service as a missionary educator in Angola, I have sought to position the American women’s foreign mission movement in a fluid transnational network shaped by and shaping gender roles (Robbins and Pullen 2011). We need to recognize that the gendered performances of many cross-cultural agents like individual missionaries, medical workers in Doctors without Borders, and Peace Corps members, even when situated within a seemingly consistent transnational organization, come to us through complex representational filters. In the case of missionaries, even those affiliated with seemingly homogenous enterprises such as Protestant evangelizing, our efforts to recover their experiences depend on such complex sources as denominational magazines framed for a particular audience—usually white, middle-class donors back in the US. So, for example, analysis of the gendered 186

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transnationalism carried out by two African American women (Nora Gordon and Clara Howard) serving at a Baptist station in the Congo toward the close of the nineteenth century should note differences in how their stories are told in a periodical for a well-to-do white audience potentially sending financial support from New England versus how these same young women are characterized for young black students reading about Gordon and Howard in the Spelman Messenger, the gender-and-race-affirming periodical of their alma mater in Atlanta (Robbins 2017, 58–64). Whether we zero in on the particular case of Laura Haygood (a privileged, well-educated white American and longtime administrator in an outpost of the British empire), Nellie Arnott (an initially-insecure white American teacher in a Portuguese stronghold during the race for Africa), or Nora Gordon and Clara Howard (African Americans enacting a vision of race-based servant leadership in the Congo), these gendered, transnational social agents should be seen as operating within a matrix of complex, sometimes contradictory, crosscultural relationships. Their experiential networks would rarely, if ever, fit straightforwardly into such neat categories as “US imperialist.” Neither, of course, would we want to cast them as carrying out a purely liberatory program—even when Arnott is determinedly bringing young Umbundu girls into a safe space for schooling that honors their resistance against an early arranged marriage in ways foreshadowing many of today’s transnational campaigns for girls’ education. When Arnott’s own magazine stories for donor consumption back in the US emphasize young “heathen” women’s hesitancy to embrace conversion to her religion, we should recognize both the audience-related performative features of this gendered discourse and related signs of Arnott’s own limited ability to reach a level of intercultural understanding that we seek today. When multiple contested influences come together in any transnational space, after all, gender is not performed in isolation, but within an ongoing constellation of social forces contributing to individual identity formation and to the ongoing, multifaceted work of culture-making. And that would include institutions ranging from a local mission school to the multi-national, interlocking organizations guiding foreign missions led by diverse management teams representing different denominations. Undoubtedly, feminist scholarship has moved away from overgeneralized categories such as “women” to addressing identity structures such as race and social class as interacting with gender. This approach, in turn, provides models for attending to local community, regional, national, and international differences operating within and across transnational sites of social action. Considering a transnational space or experience as being “intersectional,” similar to a gendered performance being “intersectional,” requires examining both terms in the most localized context possible. At the same time, we can still identify nodes of social action as gradually forming networks which, connecting through cross-site cultural exchange, may even become, themselves, transnational in their impact. Thus, when studying missionary teaching, a gendered Transnational American Studies would take into account differences between the social authority of a male preacher at a particular station and an unpaid wife serving alongside him: gender-informed analyses can underscore how patriarchy-connected power differentials shape both the transnational space of action and individuals’ lived experiences there. On a parallel front, a carefully localized consideration of transnational activity by missionaries interacting with a native population in a particular place helps us draw important contrasts between an early twentieth century posting of American missionaries to Hawai’i, where the US was itself a colonizing power, versus individuals being sent in the same decade by the same US-based missionary organization to Angola. In that second locale, Protestant teams from the US could be viewed by the Portuguese rulers as potentially dangerous collaborators aiding local blacks’ resistance by providing 187

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access to literacy learning, resisting European settlers’ participation in the slave trade, and offering up a brand of Christianity at odds with the colonizing power’s Catholicism. The nation-inflected affiliations and associated gender performance of a missionary in that Angola location at that time would be quite distinctive from his/her Hawai’i counterpart—despite their both being paid by the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM). If marking distinctions operating within a seemingly coherent social enterprise is one essential commitment of an intersectional gendered transnationalism, we can still connect these concepts to illuminate experiences most interesting for their gendered promotion of shared values and social practices across borders. In that vein, one strand of gendered Transnational American Studies can explicate (and sometimes even celebrate) community-building resistance against social norms based in restrictive gender and national identity norms. For example, we might critically re-examine such solidarity-seeking enterprises as the nineteenthcentury women’s suffrage campaign, or the women’s peace movement during World War I, or, more recently, the networks of gendered activism now combatting sex trafficking of young girls across borders. In attending to points of affiliation, collaboration, and shared vision alongside elements of difference, our efforts to combine gender and transnationalism analyses need to scrutinize where and how cross-cultural forces influence both individuals and related social structures of interaction. One fruitful pathway should shift the focus of inquiry and interpretation from the most mobile actors (whether men or women) crossing borders from one national location to another to the gendered responses of people living in the transnational spaces where others’ mobility has an impact. So, for instance, per one case referenced above, though students who attended Nellie Arnott’s mission school in Angola did not usually cross borders themselves into a different national setting, their village became a transnational space by virtue of her presence there. What impact did her work have on individuals and the community, in terms of re-figuring the gendered social practices at play, and to what extent did individuals there begin to see themselves as part of a transnational community—say, one connected through certain new gender practices in domestic life, or through a negotiated accommodation of multiple spiritual traditions, or at other nodes of cross-cultural contact? Addressing such questions entails moving beyond Arnott’s own textual records to such sources as letters written by former students after her return to the US and stories from later generations of Angolans still being shaped by the previous mission work there. In their introduction to Gender History in a Transnational Perspective, Janz and Schönpflug suggest that their scholarly practice addresses similar questions by combining both a comparative approach focused on highlighting differences at play within a specific case with interpretations highlighting “transfers across cultures” (Janz and Schönpflug 2014, 3). Combining these two perspectives, they point out, enables analysis of “the complex processes of exchange taking place, generating effects of appropriation, refusal, reinterpretation and translation” (Janz and Schönpflug 2014, 4). This blended methodology can also better explore the ongoing process of community formation in transnational spaces, including networks that become institutions and thereby “bridge boundaries and incorporate trace elements of the different contexts from which they evolved” (Janz and Schönpflug 2014, 4). One of the benefits—and associated challenges—of such work is bringing often-marginalized cultural agents into the forefront. How? Similar to the embrace of intersectionality as an analytical tool, scholars are drawing on the feminist recovery movement’s techniques to find, describe, and interpret textual records and current voices positioning gendered transnational experiences within more comprehensive social matrices than when we focus on 188

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individuals with fuller access to opportunities like mobility or institution-building. Beth Piatote’s Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature provides one apt model (2013). Piatote uses the domestic space of Native American communities—which were and are themselves distinctive nations—as a site of inquiry for recovering how indigenous citizens resisted the assimilation movement between 1879 and 1934, including its government-managed schools and the allotment of Native reservation lands. While Piatote’s study involves tracking the gendered roles of such agents as white field matrons and paternalistic administrators, she asserts a different core emphasis for her project: “The primary objective of this book is to make visible the resilience of the tribal-national domestic by centering the intimate domestic (the Indian home and family) as the primary site of struggle against the foreign force of U.S. national domestication” (Piatote 2013, 4). In other words, in the context of my advocacy here for linking of gender and transnationalism—and especially for using these terms with support from feminist practices like intersectionality and recovery—Piatote is constructing an interpretive framework that situates the contest over sovereignty within Native American communities as a gendered, transnational conflict carried out on multiple planes. She offers new readings of texts by writers like S. Alice Callahan (Creek), E. Pauline Johnson (Mohawk), John Milton Oskison (Cherokee), and Mourning Dove (Okanogan) to show how they “found themselves on the front lines of defending home and family during the assimilation era”; further, she locates their writings in a shared site of inter-tribal resistance where law, literature, and other gendered interventions interact (Piatote 2013, 11). Piatote stresses that, consistent with both the distinct tribal national identities of these activist-writers and the patriarchal power of their opponents from US and Canadian nations, this history of sustained gendered conflict must be viewed in transnational terms. Indeed, she argues: “This book demonstrates … that any examination of Native Americans during this period is of necessity transnational at its core, centering on the contest between two forms of sovereignty—settler-national and tribal-national rule—as competing national formations” (Piatote 2013, 10). An approach akin to Piatote’s, intertwining both gender and transnationalism, can be as readily applied to contemporary social sites as to historical ones. Christopher Pullen’s LGBT Transnational Identity and the Media, for instance, examines how the transnational networkbuilding capacities of our new technologies offer expansive versions of mobility affirming “proactive possibility of new connections” (Pullen 2012, 5). Specifically, he affirms: “For LGBT identity, the advent of transnational media connections, across diverse nations, East and West and the developed world and the Third World, offers new scope for sexual identity, in ways previously unseen” (Pullen 2012, 6). For Pullen, the ability to envision an “imagined” LGBT community acquires theoretical energy from thinking about transnationalism as independent of actual migration across territorial lines and instead achievable through “a Deleuzian potential” producing “a new shared imagination” (Pullen 2012, 6). On a pragmatic level, Pullen suggests, solidarity projects like those addressed within various chapters of his essay collection draw on new media practices that erase (or at least undermine) the specifics of geographic location, instead creating “connective strands” nurtured through technology-supported exchange (Pullen 2012, 7). While celebrating this potential, Pullen does hope his own and future scholarly-activist work can avoid cultivating an Anglocentric LGBT transnational vision or one that excludes such aspects of sexual diversity as asexuality and intersexuality (Pullen 2012, 9). In any case, whether or not Pullen’s collection achieves his introduction’s stated goal of “a focus on difference as cohesion” (Pullen 2012, 15), this project’s tracing of particular instances when 189

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twenty-first-century media exchanges have promoted a queer cosmopolitanism accrues epistemological dividends from bringing new media studies into dialogue with gender and transnationalism. The collection also demonstrates how expanded analytical spaces such as queer cosmopolitanism can enhance our understanding of “America.” For instance, Bruce E. Drushel’s chapter revisits George Takei’s “coming out” in the waning days of Star Trek storytelling and speculates on what the impact of that revelation might have been, had it come earlier (Drushel 2012). While Star Trek is repeatedly referenced as extending beyond the global out into aspirational space, Drushel also explores (and thereby illuminates) the nationally located experience of Takei’s family during the World War II internment of Japanese Americans to justify the actor’s reluctance to reveal a potentially disruptive aspect of his identity. Ultimately, one result of such multi-faceted linkages may sometimes be having “American” fade into the background of our interpretive frameworks. For media studies, in particular, the boundary-crossing potential of discursive exchange is being continually enhanced as more and more individuals across the globe acquire access to communication tools. (Here, on a personal note, I remember discussing with a young tour guide in rural China how his entire family’s daily life—and their sense of themselves—shifted when they acquired one shared cell phone.) As part of that process, the formation of “nation” as a source of meaning and identity is increasingly undermined, replaced (or at least supplemented) by other affiliative frames. At the same time, as the post-World War II sociopolitical power of “America” (especially the US) declines in (and in the aftermath of) the Trumpian era, we could well see a growing emphasis on other nations’ cultural capital reflected in scholarly projects organized around gender and transnationalism. Academic analyses may increasingly take on positions like Smitha Radhakrishnan’s Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class. Her study of a “new form of Indianness realized by Indian IT professionals” hinges in large part on what she terms “cultural streamlining” (Radhakrishnan 2011, 22), which enables a particular “transnational class” of feminized IT workers in and from India to navigate a global economy while maintaining strong ties to their national culture (Radhakrishnan 2011, 21). Tellingly, Radhakrishnan employs project design and interpretive tools I have discussed here as particularly useful to scholarship yoking gender and transnationalism. In Appropriately Indian, these include intersectionality (in this case, with a heavy emphasis on social class distinctions) and careful attention to comparative geography (here, an effort to address Indian IT workers situated in several locations beyond India, such as South Africa). In addition, Radhakrishnan deploys a strategic brand of feminist recovery blending standpoint self-positioning with interviews and textual analysis (such as setting participants’ responses to popular cultural imagery depicting Indian women IT workers in boundary-crossing magazines like Wired alongside the author’s own readings). Radhakrishnan folds into her introduction two elements that may forecast a shifting position for “America” in cultural work linking gender and transnationalism. One is a personal narrative. She tells the familiar story of her father’s migration to the US as a graduate student, but also chronicles his return to India to marry there before bringing his new bride back to America, and she describes how her own “background” (a term presented as a social-classrelated keyword central to her study) has enabled her whole family to succeed away from their homeland while maintaining a strong Indian identity. This story reverberates with echoes from her earlier, more analytical discussion of why she has adopted the term “transnational” for her project, even though, she notes, “global” seems to be dominating popular discourse (including the conversations with her interviewees). Her explanation of 190

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“transnational” lays out two crucial aspects of its meaning in her project (the sociological class of people she is studying and the national-boundary-crossing dimensions of her scope). However, Radhakrishnan also says she uses “transnational” to “assert the continued importance of the ‘national’ even as it might be transcended” (Radhakrishnan 2011, 18). And the national site whose culture, whose role as a site of self-definition, remains intact and therefore most critical, is India’s: even for Indians who have emigrated, and also for their children, to be a transnational IT professional actually enables continued participation in the homeland, through means such as travel and other social practices that nurture “a shared sense of cultural belonging.” So, she explains, “[t]he nation, as a territorial and cultural discourse, remains critical” (Radhakrishnan 2011, 19).

Bibliography Bennett, Tony, Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris, eds. New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Drushel, Bruce E. “If Art Imitated Reality: George Takei, Coming Out, and the Insufferably Straight Star Trek Universe.” LGBT Transnational Identity and the Media. Ed. Christopher Pullen. New York: Palgrave, 2012. 273–289. Durant, Alan. “The Significance is in the Selection: Identifying Contemporary Keywords.” Critical Quarterly 50. 1–2 (2008): 122–142. Espiritu, Augusto. “Beyond Eve and Mary: Filipino American Intellectual Heroes and the Transnational Performance of Gender and Reciprocity.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 12. 3 (2003): 361–386. Fojas, Camilla, and Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr. “Introduction.” Transnational Crossroads: Remapping the Americas and the Pacific. Eds. Camilla Fojas and Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. 1–30. Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan. An Introduction to Women’s Studies: Gender in a Transnational World. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2002. Halberstam, Judith. “Gender.” Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Eds. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. New York: NYU Press, 2007. 116–120. Hassim, Shireen. “Critical Thoughts on Keywords in Gender and History: An Introduction.” Gender & History 28 (2016): 299–306. Heredia, Juanita. “Voyages South and North: The Politics of Transnational Gender Identity in Caramelo and American Chica .” Latino Studies 5 (2007): 340–357. Janz, Oliver, and Daniel Schönpflug. “Introduction.” Gender History in a Transnational Perspective: Networks, Biographies, Gender Orders. Eds. Oliver Janz and Daniel Schönpflug. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. 1–24. Kuo, Karen. East Is West and West Is East: Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. Lowe, Lisa. “Globalization.” Keywords for American Cultural Studies. Eds. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. New York: NYU Press, 2007. 120–123. Nolin, Catherine. Transnational Ruptures: Gender and Forced Migration. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Pessar, Patricia R., and Sarah J. Mahler. “Transnational Migration: Bringing Gender In.” The International Migration Review 37 (2003): 812–846. Piatote, Beth H. Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Pullen, Christopher. “Introduction.” LGBT Transnational Identity and the Media. Ed. Christopher Pullen. New York: Palgrave, 2012. 1–20. Radhakrishnan, Smitha. Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Robbins, Sarah Ruffing. Learning Legacies: Archive to Action through Women’s Cross-cultural Teaching. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017.

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Sarah Ruffing Robbins Robbins, Sarah. Managing Literacy, Mothering America: Women’s Narratives on Reading and Writing in the Nineteenth Century. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006[2004]. Robbins, Sarah, and Ann Ellis Pullen, eds. Nellie Arnott’s Writing On Angola, 1905–1913: Missionary Narratives Linking Africa and America. Anderson: Parlor Press, 2011. Wiegman, Robyn, and Donald E. Pease, eds. The Futures of American Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana, 1983[1976]. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. 2nd edition. London: Fontana, 1983. Wolfreys, Julian. “Gender.” Critical Keywords in Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Palgrave, 2004. 74–81.

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17 ETHIOPIANISM, GENDER, AND TRANSNATIONALISM IN PAULINE HOPKINS’S OF ONE BLOOD Elizabeth West

Introduction The foundation of black Atlantic African consciousness is all too often attributed to movements such as Garveyism, Negritude, the Harlem Renaissance, and Pan-Africanism. Without question contemporary studies in black transnationalism must account for the contributions of these twentieth-century movements. The shortfall of beginning with these twentiethcentury influences, however, is the incomplete narrative they tell. The legacy of black transnationalism as a state of consciousness begins with early black writers and activists who, though fewer in numbers and perhaps less celebrated than their twentieth-century successors, imagined blackness as a product of trans-Atlantic and trans-African networks. Among the earliest tropes that signaled transnational blackness was the often-employed invocation to Ethiopia. In her 1902–1903 serialized novel, Of One Blood, or the Hidden Self and her later nonfiction study, A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by its Descendants (Hopkins 2007), turn-of-the-century author, Pauline Hopkins, poignantly represents the bridge between early and twentieth-century African American writers invoking Ethiopia as trope in their origins narratives.1 In large part Ethiopianism was an answer to western-originating assaults on black humanity and questionings on Africa’s relevance in the history of civilization. Identifying blacks as direct descendants of the ancient Ethiopians–and thus also connected to ancient Egypt and Judaism—this myth of black origins was regularly appropriated in black writings. The transnational thread in Of One Blood is woven from kings and queens of ancient Ethiopia to their black descendants thousands of years and miles away in the United States. While Hopkins constructs a reverential picture of Ethiopia’s royal line, her Ethiopian queens and their American descendants are limited in terms of mobility and influence. Contrastingly, the kings and the novel’s male protagonist, Reuel, are physically and intellectually superior to the novel’s fragile heroine. Like the stock hero of sentimental fiction, Reuel is the protector and provider of home, called out into the larger world. Hopkins dares to seat African women as the mothers of civilization; however, the novel’s sentimental framework trumps its 193

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transnational plot, leaving Africa’s mother of mothers eerily reminiscent of the stock white heroine of sentimental fiction. Does Hopkins’s vision of Ethiopianism open up possibilities for radical expressions of black womanhood or possibilities for black female authority or autonomy? Her concomitant appropriation of Sentimental and Ethiopianist tropes is apparent, but whether her transnational narrative moves readers to clear affirmations of black womanhood is less clear. Hopkins designs her fictional work to illustrate the historical connection between ancient Ethiopians and blacks that she draws in her nonfiction work. Constructing an origins legend that seats humankind and civilization not in the western world, but in Africa—specifically Ethiopia, she seizes an opportunity to imagine and represent Africans in defiance to the prevailing racist discourse of her era. She anchors her narrative in a mythical royal line of Ethiopian kings and queens to illustrate ancient Africa’s splendor and power. On the surface, Hopkins’s Of One Blood might easily be deemed illustrative of turn-of-thecentury black women’s writings that have been too often dismissed as emulations of a fading Victorian or sentimental worldview.2 The writings by these black women were deemed mere acquiescence to fading white paradigms of gender and society. There is no shortage of glaring tropes of sentimentalism: foremost, there is the fragile, chaste, innocent heroine (Dianthe) and her noble, self-sacrificing male protector (Reuel). Not insignificant is the physical appearance of the two main characters, who though black by virtue of ancestry, are white by all that is visible to the eye. Hopkins’s ploy here is not simply an overture to notions of white universality or supremacy, but more strategically a challenge to western paradigms of racial identity and certainty. Despite its overture to sentimentalism, Of One Blood is notable among Hopkins’s fiction for its added challenge to the emerging discourse of Eugenics at the turn of the century—a challenge that Hopkins anchors in centuries-old New World black discourses of Ethiopianism. Hopkins’s artistic and historical musings on Ethiopia and black identity echo a number of her black contemporaries and predecessors, who shaped their mythological look to Ethiopia in large part from their readings of ancient writings and ironically, western discourses of race and antiquity that were articulated at the onset of new world slaving. While literary traditions existed among pre Middle Passage continental African empires, in general blacks in the new world entered into literacy through texts that anchored western literacy and learning as well. Thus, like their white counterparts, new world blacks encountered the Bible early on, and as works in Latin and ancient writings of Greece and Rome served as the foundation of learning, black literacy was shaped by this tradition. Blacks did not have to go deeply into the Bible to see themselves and then, like their white counterparts, to connect themselves to blacks in antiquity. In the Bible, in writings of ancient Greeks, Romans and Arabs, blacks are present—and not in the denigrated state of New World blacks. The biblical Cush is translated into Greek as Ethiopian (burnt faces). Whether they are named Cush, Ham, Nubia, or Ethiopia, they are a population clearly integral to the ancient world that is today recognized as the foundation of western civilization. Biblical references to the Ethiopian’s black skin, their biblical appearances from Genesis through the New Testament, and references to Ethiopia in works by ancients such as Homer and Herodotus (describes Ethiopians as “the tallest and handsomest of men” (quoted in Rushmore 2001, 2)) illustrate the Ethiopian’s equal and oftentimes superior status among his contemporaries in the ancient world. While New World blacks certainly heard the dominant racial discourse that deemed them inferior, through their forays into literacy they encountered texts that suggested otherwise. 194

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Blueprint for transcontinental black identity: Ethiopianism in early black America Ethiopianism in the African American literary and cultural imagination dates back to some of the earliest extant writings by blacks in Colonial America.3 Hopkins’s race theory informs this novel, as its conclusion affirms Ethiopia as the seat of humankind’s spiritual and civilized history. The added implication of Ethiopia’s centrality to the plot is that as the center of human development in antiquity, Ethiopia represents both the great past and the future promise of Africa and its descendants. Just as the ancient great minds of Ethiopia had catapulted the ancient world to great achievements, the restoration of modern Ethiopia would again propel mankind to new greatness. In the eighteenth-century poetry of Phillis Wheatley and the published addresses of Prince Hall we find examples of early black proclamations of Ethiopianism. Into the nineteenth century we find a continuation of this identity construct rooted in the presumption that Ethiopia is the ancestral home of blacks. From early nineteenth-century black activist David Walker to mid-century and later figures such as Martin Delany, Edward Blyden, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner to early twentieth century giant, Marcus Garvey, black leaders passed on the legacy of Ethiopianism inscribed in some of the earliest publications by blacks in Colonial America. Even Frederick Douglass, an assimilationist who unlike his black nationalist peers, did not advocate for ties between New World and continental Africans, concluded his 1854 narrative, My Bondage My Freedom, with the oft acclaimed prophesy from Psalm 68:31, that “Ethiopia shall yet reach forth her hand unto God.”4 African American Ethiopianism became shaped as blacks appropriated biblical and secular history to construct a New World black identity seated in Ethiopia, the ancient origins of the descendants of Ham and the cradle of humankind. Of One Blood proves the medium through which Hopkins, who sees Ethiopia as a divine and historical black homeland, transforms her historical read of ancient Ethiopia into a fictional mythology of race and racial origins, seating not only black lineage, but the origins of all human kind to black antiquity. While Of One Blood emphasizes a connection between modern blacks or Africans and an ancient black civilization in Ethiopia, Hopkins also underscores in this fictional work her understanding of humankind as having originated out of a single source. This she more expressly explained in her nonfiction tract, “A Primer of Facts,” where she explores the question of identity and human origins. Here Hopkins argues that “until the entry of Noah’s family into the ark, all people were of the one race and complexion” (Hopkins 2007, 335). Again, Hopkins is not the first among African American thinkers and writers who maintain Ethiopia as the divine and historical root of black identity. In the works of Phillis Wheatley, one of America’s first black poets, we find an early example of black literary musings that draw a historical thread between blacks in the new world and the most ancient of blacks— that is, Ethiopians and Egyptians. Though Wheatley is born in West Africa, she repeatedly identifies herself and blacks in general, as Egyptians, Ethiopians, descendants of Ham, thereby marking black identity as monolithic, transcontinental, and transnational. In similar fashion, Wheatley’s contemporary, Prince Hall, early voice of black solidarity and founder of the Prince Hall Masons, underscored ancient Ethiopia’s influence in biblical history and its significance as the ancestral home of black Africa. Though this is not the focus of his 1797 “Charge, Delivered to the African Lodge,” Hall reminds his audience that Moses sought the counsel of his Ethiopian father-in-law, Jethro; that the great Solomon welcomed the Queen of Sheba to his royal court; and that among the earliest conversions to Christianity was the eunuch of Ethiopian Queen Candace who was baptized by the Apostle Philip. 195

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This link between new world blacks and ancient Ethiopia resonated in David Walker’s 1829 Appeal, a fiery condemnation of American slavery and slaveholders. While the Appeal focuses on the rights denied but to be claimed by blacks in the United States, he also reminded his audience that no less than whites, blacks are the descendants of an ancient legacy of human achievement. Walker asserts that “the Egyptians were Africans or coloured people, such as we are—some of them yellow and others dark—a mixture of Ethiopians and the natives of Egypt” (Turner 1993, 28). He further asserts that, “by the sons of Africa or of Ham … learning originated, and was carried thence into Greece” (Walker 1993, 39). This vision of the identity of ancient Egyptians was even addressed in James McCune Smith’s introduction to Frederick Douglass’s 1855 autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom. Explaining the likeness that Douglass drew between his mother and the image of an ancient Egyptian figure that he had seen in Prichard’s Natural History of Man, Smith asserts (to dispel any speculation that Douglass understood the Egyptians to be white) that the Egyptians were black: “The Egyptians, like the Americans, were a mixed race, with some negro blood circling around the throne, as well as in the mud hovels.”5 Far more explicit and detailed in his transcontinental vision of black identity, Martin Delany seats the origin of freemasonry in ancient Africa. According to Delany “in the earliest period of the Egyptian and Ethiopian dynasties, the institution of Masonry was first established” (Delany 2003, 53). In his later 1879 tract, The Origin of Races and Color, Delany explains the black origin of Egypt and Ethiopia: That the rule of Cush extended from the Nilotic borders of Egypt quite in toward the interior of the country, the whole of which was called Ethiopia, is indisputable; and it is a fact which learned men will not dispute, that in the early settlement of those countries, Egypt and Ethiopia were united Kingdoms … (Delany 1991, 41–42) Delany then concludes that this ancient black kingdom informed the vision of the great biblical patriarch Moses: the literature of the Israelites, both in the science of letters and government, also religion, was derived from the Africans, as they must have carried with them the civilization of those peoples and that country, in their memorable exodus, as the highest encomium upon Moses in the Scripture is, that he “was learned in all the wisdom of the Ethiopians.” (Delany 1991, 55) As one of the key patriarchal figures of ancient Judaism and ultimately Christianity, Moses establishes social and legal codes that provide the blueprint for Christianity and thus modern civilization. Delany then intimates that western/white civilization is intellectually and spiritually indebted to ancient Africa. It is this link between new world blacks and ancient Ethiopia and to the foundation of western civilization that Hopkins invokes in Of One Blood. In her essay, “Pauline Hopkins and the Occult: African-American Revisions of Nineteenth-Century Sciences,” Susan Gillman recalls Hopkins’s deep interest in the theory of race and her rejection of the leading white racist theories of her time. She argues that Of One Blood advances Hopkins’s Ethiopianism and that “the Meroe section of the novel brings us to the heart of Hopkins’s Africa and the center of her strategy of using archaeological data to refute the claims of ethnological 196

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science” (Gillman 1966, 66). While Claudia Tate points out that the mythical Candace in Hopkins’s Of One Blood “marks a very early appearance of the ‘brown’ heroine in AfroAmerican fiction” (Gillman 1966, 64) the novel moves beyond American borders and beyond the African American community. The mythical Candace of Hopkins’s novel echoes and is likely born out of the story of Solomon and Sheba often recalled in the writings of early African Americans. Explaining women’s active role in spiritual ritual in ancient Africa, Martin Delany summarized this legend: “Among other nations of the ancients, priestesses were common, as is known to the erudite in history; and Candace, queen of Sheba, was a high priestess in her realm—hence her ability to meet King Solomon in the temple” (Delany 2003, 55). Hopkins’s heroine, Dianthe, is the mythical reincarnation of this line of queens.

Ethiopianism and transnational blackness in Of One Blood In general, Of One Blood underscores the prevailing tension between the self-proclaimed authority of Anglo rationalism and science and the mystical or supernatural cosmology of the east, that is, Ethiopianism. This conflict is symbolized in the embodiment of the main character, Reuel Briggs. Reuel is American born, of black and white ancestry, and as revealed late in the novel, is tied to the royal line that dates back to the great ancient empire of Ethiopia/ Meroe. Reuel’s connection to royal antiquity is hinted in his very name: among appearances of this name in the Bible are Reuel the son of Esau in Genesis (36:4, 10); Reuel the father-in-law of Moses in Exodus (2:18) and Numbers (10:29). Even before Reuel’s Ethiopian ancestry is revealed, he demonstrates extraordinary mythical insights and powers and an ontological vision that transcends the western linear understanding of being. When he restores Dianthe from the dead, he illustrates a power beyond the ordinary. To his doubting white medical peers, Reuel explains a cosmological view that they cannot grasp: “The supernatural presides over man’s formation always … Perhaps the superstitious masses came nearer to solving the mysteries of creation than the favored elect will ever come” (Hopkins 1988, 469). When Reuel journeys to Ethiopia the secret of his great powers is revealed: “He had carefully hidden his Ethiopian extraction from the knowledge of the world. It was a tradition among those who had known him in childhood that he was descended from a race of African kings” (Hopkins 1988, 557–558). Through Professor Stone, the novel’s English scientist who heads the excursion into the interior of Ethiopia, Hopkins echoes black voices that have proclaimed Ethiopia’s great legacy and its connection to a line of great kings and people. Professor Stone summarizes Ethiopia’s history and import, explaining that before the celebrated civilizations of the Romans and Greeks and even earlier than the ancient Hebrews and Egyptians, —Nimrod and Mizraim—both descendants of Ham—led the way, and acted as the pioneers of mankind in the untrodden fields of knowledge. The Ethiopians, therefore, manifested great superiority over all the nations among whom they dwelt, and their name became illustrious throughout Europe, Asia and Africa. (Hopkins 1988, 531) He traces the ancient Ethiopians to a divine legacy and then declares African Americans their descendants: “The father of this distinguished race [ancient Ethiopians] was Cush, the grandson of Noah, an Ethiopian,” and “… Afro-Americans are a branch of the wonderful and mysterious Ethiopians who had a prehistoric existence of magnificence” (Hopkins 1988, 531–532). 197

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Gender, transnational spaces, and the black woman in Of One Blood As the reincarnation of Ergamenes, the first king of ancient Ethiopia, Reuel is the novel’s hero. His mythical return to his African origins and his destined place as their king and leader signals his central place in the narrative. Although the three siblings—Reuel, Aubrey, and Dianthe—are born to the royal line of ancient Ethiopian rulers, only Reuel survives to return and rule. Although she is described in the likeness of the line of ancient queens, Dianthe’s likeness, Candace is found in the flesh in Ethiopia, awaiting Reuel’s return. Dianthe is ultimately not needed. Her death does not threaten the survival of the royal line. Aubrey dies, but since he is the evil sibling, his death helps to clean or purify the ancestral line. Ethiopia then awaits its royal male heir to bring it out of centuries old isolation and stasis. A line of Candaces have awaited the coming of the reborn Ergamenes; thus, though she has the royal mark, Dianthe is not central to the restoration of the people and kingdom. Her death does not hinder the destined restoration of the ancient monarchy. From the novel’s onset, Dianthe seems the helpless creature destined for an untimely end. Although Scott Trafton reads Dianthe as an empowering figure in the novel, her ultimate lack of agency and self-realization render Trafton’s assertion a hard sell. Trafton identifies Dianthe’s grandmother, Aunt Hannah, as the “holder of buried secrets,” and deems Dianthe the female power figure: It is … Dianthe, not the explicitly marked ‘Voodoo witch’ Aunt Hannah, who is the conjure woman in Of One Blood. Dianthe’s tripartite singing of ‘Go Down, Moses’ structures the text as a whole … and conjures all of the discoveries of the text into existence. (Hopkins 2007, 523) While Dianthe may function as a kind of trigger—and clearly, a passive one—she is simply a vessel in this regard. She has no conscious powers of sight or action. Perhaps it is not inconsequential that Dianthe’s Greek, rather than biblical or Ethiopian name, hints at her deficiency (perhaps too much of western influence/blood) in the royal African line. While Reuel and Aubrey are introduced as rational and autonomous, Dianthe, the female sibling, is the stark contrast. The three siblings are able to “pass” as white, and Dianthe as female, can be cast in the sentimental tradition of ideal womanhood: She was not in any way the preconceived idea of a Negro. Fair as the fairest woman in the hall, with wavy bands of chestnut hair, and great, melting eyes of brown, soft as those of childhood; a willowy figure of exquisite mould. (Hopkins 1988, 453) She is, throughout the narrative, a figure always teetering on the brink of death. Shortly after her performance at the novel’s start, Dianthe is “killed” in an accident and brought back to life by Reuel through his mystical powers. When she is awakened from death, she emerges in a helpless state that becomes her sustained image: “She was like a child—so trusting” (Hopkins 1988, 470). With no memory of her identity, she then becomes the ward of Reuel, and later through deceit, Aubrey. Dianthe speaks little in the novel, and her future rests in the hands of others rather than herself. Reuel and Aubrey discuss her care and her fate as she lingers in the shadows, helpless. When Reuel announces his plan to depart for the journey to Ethiopia, she voices her 198

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helplessness and anxiety over being left alone. She pleads with Reuel to stay for her benefit: “‘No, I am not strong!’ she interrupted with a wild burst of tears. ‘Reuel, if you knew how weak I am you would not leave me’” (Hopkins 1988, 499). In Reuel’s absence, Dianthe falls into an unconscious state after the boating accident staged by Aubrey. She awakens again to an absence of memory and a highly weakened emotional state (Hopkins 1988, 597). Even when Dianthe takes decided action—that is, to kill Aubrey, after she discovers his murderous and deceptive actions—it is action out of hysteria, and a plot that she is unable to successfully execute. She is made to drink the deadly potion that she had concocted for Aubrey. That Dianthe marries her brother—though unknowingly—also signals her closer alliance to her western ancestry. The incest here echoes the more blatant historical incest of white masters whose sexual violation of black women resulted in a legacy of physical and sexual trauma. Perhaps Dianthe’s death in the new world suggests the end of this history of terror. This is arguably signaled by Aunt Hannah’s ultimate return to Ethiopia with Reuel, where she will then end her days among the royal ancestral line of Candaces. Aunt Hannah is female, and she is past the age of reproduction, but she is also—unlike Dianthe—consciously and autonomously linked to her African ancestry; thus, a more fitting figure in the female dynasty. As Scott Trafton noted in his read of Aunt Hannah, she is the seer: in this respect, her name ties her to antiquity, to the biblical Hannah, who was a prophetess. Dianthe dies at the novel’s end and physically remains in the new world, but the line of Candaces and the living Candace who becomes Reuel’s bride in Ethiopia are the physical likeness of Dianthe. Throughout the novel, the narrator reiterates Dianthe’s physical appearance as “pale” and “white-faced,” and more readily identified as white than black. When Reuel first encounters the Candace of Ethiopia that he will wed, he is immediately struck by her likeness to Dianthe: She reminded him strongly of his beautiful Dianthe; in face, the resemblance was so striking that it was painful … She was the same height as Dianthe, had the same well-developed shoulders and the same admirable bust … Yes; she was a Venus, a superb statue of bronze … Long, jet-black hair and totally free, covered her shoulders like a silken mantle; a broad, square forehead, a warm bronze complexion; thick black eyebrows, great black eyes … a delicate nose with quivering nostrils, teeth of dazzling whiteness behind lips as red as a rose. (Hopkins 1988, 568–569) While the Ethiopian Candace is free of the whiteness that physically marks Dianthe, her bronze complexion, her unstereotypically “African” nose, her non-racially described lips, and her likeness to Dianthe suggests an appearance that is racially ambiguous by western identity conventions. Readers may see this as Hopkins’s subversion of the white-black racial binary, but what is the ultimate import of obscuring the racial identity of ancient Ethiopia in Hopkins’s narrative? Ultimately the novel asserts the common origins of humankind, locating those origins in ancient Ethiopia, and underscoring the racial black identity of those ancient Ethiopians. Its transnational import is glaring through the interconnectedness drawn between blacks across time and place. The novel is bold in its depiction of blackness as a global identity that originates from a central and ancient national origin; however the narrative falls short in its development of the female line. The racially ambiguous appearance of the sacred line of Ethiopian queens is an oddity in the narrative. Their remarkably white washed skin seems inconsistent with the story that awaiting the return of the royal heir, Ergamenes, they have 199

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generationally preserved the royal line through their isolation from the outside world. Such isolation would hardly have rendered them in the likeness of their racially mixed American counterpart, Dianthe. In her nonfictional writings, Hopkins reveals that she was well read in the history of ancient Ethiopia and saw its legacy dating back to black origins from which humanity and civilization sprang. That this is articulated in the novel by the narrator and the characters, but compromised by the female progenitors undermines the general force of the novel and underscores again the inability of black writers to affirm the combination of beauty and strength in the black female body, free of western/white markers. The failure of the novel in this regard does not speak to an authorial lapse singular to Hopkins, however. For Africans in the Americas and those throughout the Atlantic world, trans-Atlantic slaving fueled a racialized gender discourse that rendered a combination of black and female outside the margins of ideal womanhood. Extending into the early twentieth century and with few exceptions, fictional narratives of slavery revealed the authors’ conflation of ideal (and presumably universal) womanhood into the white female body. Hopkins follows suit with her near white black heroines, but she deviates by layering this narrative form and its female trope into a mythological yet transnational tale of Ethiopia. In Hopkins’s novel Ethiopia is the geographical, ancestral, and cultural center of trans-Atlantic black identity: the scattered new world dispersion of blacks points to shared origins to this ancient black world. This exaltation is anchored in the story’s focus on the Ethiopian queens and mothers who represent the origins of humanity. That Hopkins describes her African/Ethiopian heroines as more European than African in physical appearance illustrates to modern readers the legacy that informs representations of black women to the present. It is a legacy of which Kenyan film star and Academy Award winner (“Best Supporting Actress” for her role as the slave girl Patsy in 12 Years a Slave), Lupita Nyong’o, reminds us. In her acceptance speech for the Black Women in Hollywood’s “Best Breakthrough Performance Award,” Nyong’o shared an excerpt from the letter of a young admirer who confessed that Nyong’o’s success on stage had changed her self-perception: “I think you’re really lucky to be this Black but yet this successful in Hollywood overnight. I was just about to buy Dencia’s Whitenicious cream to lighten my skin when you appeared on the world map and saved me.”6 More than a century in time lies between the publication of Hopkins’s Of One Blood and Lupita Nyong’o’s portrayal of an unambiguously black slave girl—beautiful, dark, and heroic. Perhaps there is a twist of irony in the young Kenyan actress reaching across the Atlantic to play the part of an African American slave girl: in a kind of reversal of Hopkins’s gaze across the Atlantic to Africa, Nyong’o gazes blackness from Africa to America. In her role as Patsy and in her public speeches where she explains how she came to love her black self in a world that provided little validation of black and female, Nyong’o helps us understand why Of One Blood and its muddied portrait of black womanhood remains relevant to present day debates on racism and transnational representations of black women.

Notes 1 Hopkins’s intellectual predecessors and peers in this regard, were, for the most part, men: in Pauline Hopkins: A Literary Biography Hanna Wallinger credits William Wells Brown’s The Rising Son (1874), and Martin R. Delany’s Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color (1879), and Rufus L. Perry’s The Cushite; or, The Descendants of Ham (1893) as clear sources for Hopkins, and she speculates that Hopkins also knew George Washington Williams’s 1883 History of the Negro Race in America, 1619 to 1880. Similarly, Mandy A. Reid aptly posits (“Utopia Is in the Blood: The Bodily Utopias of Martin R. Delany and Pauline Hopkins”) a comparison between Delany and Hopkins’s discourses of racial science.

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2

3 4 5 6

In their eighteenth-century writings, Prince Hall and Phillis Wheatley refer to blacks as Ethiops and sons of Ham, exemplifying pre-nineteenth century appropriations of Ethiopia as black homeland. Women activists of this period are often associated with what some historians have called “The Black Women’s Club Movement”. Emerging in the late decades of the nineteenth century and flourishing into the first decades of the twentieth century, this movement consisted of black women’s organizations across the nation, founded and led primarily by middle class black women, especially those educated and/or the wives of prominent black leaders. These organizations held to a common theme of racial uplift and improvement, and this was propagated through calls for black education, social and political rights, and women’s rights and improvements as well. For a more detailed discussion of Ethiopianism and early black activism and nationalism, see Moses (1993). See Douglas (2003, 244). Douglas paraphrases the biblical verse that reads in the King James Version, “Princes shall come out of Egypt, Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God.” Douglass (2003, liv). Quoted in “Lupita Nyong’o Delivers Moving Black Women in Hollywood Acceptance Speech.” 28 February 2004. http://www.essence.com/2014/02/27/lupita-nyongo-delivers-moving-black-womenhollywood-acceptance-speech/.

Bibliography Delany, Martin R. Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color. Philadelphia: Harper and Brother, 1879. Delany, Martin R. The Origin of Races and Color. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1991 (reprint). Delany, Martin R. “Origin and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry.” Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader. Ed. Robert S. Lavine. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2003 (reprint). Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. Ed. John Stauffer. New York: The Modern Library, 2003. Gillman, Susan. “Pauline Hopkins and the Occult: African-American Revisions of Nineteenth-Century Sciences.” American Literary History 8. 1 (1996): 66. Hopkins, Pauline. Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self. The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins. Ed. Henry L. Gates. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Hopkins, Pauline. “A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by the Descendants—with Epilogue.” Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins. Ed. Ira Dworkin. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. 335–351. Hopkins, Pauline. A Literary Biography Hanna Wallinger. Athens: University GA Press, 2012. Moses, Jeremiah Wilson. Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Golden Age of Black Nationalism. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1993. Perry, Rufus L. The Cushite; or, The Descendants of Ham. Springfield, MA: Willey & Co., 1893. Reid, Mandy A. “Utopia Is in the Blood: The Bodily Utopias of Martin R. Delany and Pauline Hopkins.” Utopian Studies 22. 1 (Spring 2011): 91–103. Rushmore, Louis. “Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians.” Gospel Gazette Online 3. 12 (2001): 2–12. Tate, Claudia. “Pauline Hopkins: Our Literary Foremother.” Conjuring: Black Women Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Eds. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Trafton, Scott. Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Turner, James. “Introduction.” David Walker’s Appeal. Ed. David Walker. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1993. Walker, David, ed. David Walker’s Appeal. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1993. Wells Brown, William. The Rising Son. Boston: A.G. Brown, 1874. Williams, George Washington. History of the Negro Race in America, 1619 to 1880. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1882.

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18 TRANSNATIONALISM, AUTOBIOGRAPHY, AND CRITICISM The spaces of women’s imagination Isabel Durán

Introduction: The transnational turn in American studies Some years ago, Christopher Bigsby began his keynote speech at the Complutense University of Madrid with the following admission: “Since I am a professor of American studies, I thought I should begin with a confession. I really don’t understand America. My only consolation is that I don’t think Americans do either” (Bigsby 2011, 114). Sarcastic and witty as the quote may read, it contains a lot of truth, as does his conclusion that “if we are all Americans, all Americans are us” (Bigsby 2011, 126). To prove his thesis that we all live in a global world and that our notions of the defining characteristics of individual countries are suspect, he used examples drawn from food ways, sports, movies, (popular) culture, and language, which prove that “America is a postmodern culture, an immigrant culture whose master story is composed of many other stories. And that is increasingly true of the world” (Bigsby 2011, 123). As a matter of fact, we only have to look at the history of the formation of the U.S. to comprehend that “we are all Americans” and that “Americans are us.” As Thomas Sowell explains in Ethnic America: A History, the peopling of America is one of the great dramas in all of human history. Over the years, a massive stream of humanity—45 million people—crossed every ocean and continent to reach the United States. They came speaking nearly every language and representing every nationality, race, and religion. Today, he explains, there are more people of Irish ancestry in the United States than in Ireland, more Jews than in Israel, more blacks than in most African countries. There are more people of Polish ancestry in Detroit than in most of the leading cities in Poland, and more than twice as many people of Italian ancestry in New York as in Venice. (Sowell 1981, 3) Once transnational views of America have become part of the core of American Studies, we, non-Americans and Americans alike, are beginning to understand the U.S. less restrictively, and expressions like “American mosaic” (Rico and Mano 1995), America as a “cultural bouillabaisse” (quoted in Reed 2018), international America, or “transnational America” 202

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(Grewal) pervade the scholarly jargon and influence the intellectual thought of most Americanists today. American culture may have become internationally dominant, but America itself has been internationalized; it has become a universal nation (Grey 2009, 128). But what is this transnational turn that permeates American Studies of late? As Alfred Hornung reminds us, the truth is that as early as 1916 Randolph Bourne proposed the concept of a “Trans-national America”: counteracting the patriotic Americanization campaign during World War I, Bourne rejected the failed concept of America as a melting pot according to Anglo-Saxon ideas, and replaced the idea of nationality by a concept of “transnationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors” (quoted in Hornung 2005, 72). Strangely, calls for a transnational approach to American Studies from academia are only some 20 years old. Ursula Heise describes the transnational turn as the “increasing interest in approaching the study of US culture in a more international framework, in terms of both the questions being asked and the resources deployed to answer them” (Heise 2008, 381). The drive to internationalize the study of American culture is not new, but it assumed a new urgency from the mid-1990s on, following “the process of (economic) globalization spearheaded by the Clinton administration, and a world linked by the internet” (Hornung 2005, 67). Previous to this transnational turn, during the 1980s and early 1990s, Heise continues to argue, a great deal of literary practice and criticism was dedicated to the exploration of family histories, places of origin, migration, local communities, material contexts, embodied experiences, and situated forms of knowledge. The conceptualization of many of these local subjects as composites of different cultural, racial, ethnic, religious, or national traditions—as in Homi Bhabha’s explorations of “hybridity,” for example, or Gloria Anzaldúa’s portrayal of the borderlands identity of the “New Mestiza”—paved the way for the recent shift from the localized subject within the nation to the one that “reaches across national borders in what has variously come to be theorized as critical internationalism, transnationalism, diaspora, or cosmopolitanism” (Heise 2008, 382). And Jonathan Arac takes the argument one step further when he sees the positive outcomes of a more comparativist outlook of American literary history: It is quite common to think about American literary history in relation to American economic history, American social history, American political history, American religious history, etc., but it is much less common to think about American literary history in relation to Mexican literary history, French literary history, Russian literary history, Chinese literary history, etc. I do not mean that no studies have ever made connections of work to work or author to author, but we have barely begun thinking about how to compare the large literary history of the US to the literary history of another nation. (Arac 2008, 2–3) Likewise, in her presidential address of the 2004 American Studies Association (ASA) meeting, Shelley Fisher Fishkin spoke against the national paradigm of the United States as a clearly bordered geographical and political space, and called for projects that analyze America as part of “a world system, in which the exchange of commodities, the flow of capital, and the iterations of cultures know no borders” (Fishkin 2005, 21). Until recently, she observed, “the world was still divided into ‘us’ and ‘them,’ the ‘domestic’ and the ‘foreign,’ the ‘national’ and ‘international.’” But the complexity of today’s American Studies requires “that we pay as much attention to the ways in which ideas, people, culture, and capital have circulated and continue to circulate physically, and virtually, throughout the world”; it requires 203

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“that we see the inside and outside, domestic and foreign, national and international, as interpenetrating” (Fishkin 2005, 21). In her address, Fishkin anticipated “the work of border-crossing authors, artists, and cultural forms” (Fishkin 2005, 32). It is one of those border-crossing genres and some of those border-crossing women authors that I will bring into my comparative reading of a transnational flow of ideas and literary forms, in the chapter that follows.

Autobiography and criticism The transnational genre I will focus on has been variously called confessional, personal, or autobiographical criticism; autocritography, or autocritique, to name but a few (Freedman 1996, 3). It is not a new literary form, of course: as early as 1906, Stephen Reynolds used the term “autobiografiction” to describe a hybrid genre similar to the ones named above. He defines this genre as a composite where “the three converging lines—autobiography, fiction and the essay—meet” (Reynolds 1906, 28). My transnational approach to American literature will focus on the critical, “autobiografictional” texts Rooms of Our Own (Gubar 2006) by American professor and critic Susan Gubar, and Negotiating with the Dead (Atwood 2002) by Canadian writer and poet Margaret Atwood. A third book, which will have some cameo appearances, is La loca de la casa, written by Spanish writer and literary journalist Rosa Montero (2003). I will thus establish a dialogue between three texts that were produced in different parts of the world but within a time span of only four years (2002 to 2006), and between their authors, three well-known, best-selling women writers and critics in their own countries and internationally. Additionally, there is one further evident feminist and transatlantic dialogue between Gubar’s Rooms of Our Own and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1995); this is not just a passing allusion, but an engagement with Woolf’s work in the truest sense. Moreover, Susan Gubar portrays a truly transnational attitude in the chapter entitled “Global Poetics” when she states that English Literature survives these days because it crosses national divides: “English and American Literature [is] in the process of transforming itself into world literature in English” (Gubar 2006, 145). The pioneering theorists of the 1950s and 1960s were preoccupied by whether or how autobiography could constitute an art, and how to define it generically. But since the 1970s and 1980s when the field began to grow, these terms of value have been somehow displaced, triggered by the advent of cultural studies, which propelled analyses of popular and mass culture as social, rather than aesthetic formation. Feminist and postcolonial critics, for their part, produced readings of the political and social power of the symbolic self in autobiographies and memoirs. And, finally, psychoanalytic approaches to life writing questioned presumptions of meaning inherent in the linear form of life narrative, while philosophers and deconstructionists like Roland Barthes or Paul de Man raised debates about allegory, mimesis, rhetoric, and sign in such texts (see Jensen 2009). The state of the field today, as Margaretta Jolly aptly summarizes, “is a layering over of formalist analyses with historical, psychological and social perspectives on, for example, life writing’s role in migration or family, the politics of cultural trade, the psychology of identity or the healing of social and personal ills” (quoted in Jensen 2009, 304). To sum up, throughout the critical history of life writing, there has been an inherent tension in the genre between the value ascribed to the subjects of life writing—the fluid and multi-faceted “true” self—and that awarded to the objects through which these selves are communicated: the static art “form”; or, in other words, between subject (autos) and object (graphein). Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2010) in their book entitled Reading Autobiography devote a chapter to the explanation of 60 genres of life writing. None of these 60 genres, however, 204

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is autocritography, which is the one in which I inscribe the books I discuss here. The bios in these texts focuses on the scholarly concerns of the critic on the one hand, or on the writerly aspects of the author’s career, on the other. The word “autocritography” was first used by African-American critic Henry Louis Gates to describe a book of critical essays, to signify “an autobiography of a critical concept” (Gates 1992, 40). It is, in other words, an account of the individual, social, and institutional conditions that help to produce a writer or scholar and, hence, his/her professional concerns.1 Autocritography flourished in the 1990s, but the main rationale behind its practice was expressed by scholar and leading exponent of reader-response criticism Jane Tompkins, in her 1987 essay “Me and my Shadow”: The problem is that you can’t talk about your private life in the course of doing your professional work. You have to pretend that epistemology, or whatever you’re writing about, has nothing to do with your life, that it’s more exalted, more important, because it (supposedly) transcends the merely personal. Well, I’m tired of the conventions that keep discussions of epistemology, or James Joyce, segregated from meditations on what is happening outside my window or inside my heart. The public-private dichotomy, which is to say the public-private hierarchy, is a founding condition of female oppression. I say to hell with it. … The reason I feel embarrassed at my own attempts to speak personally in a professional context is that I have been conditioned to feel that way. That’s all there is to it. (Tompkins 1987, 169) It is no wonder, then, that the mode I am discussing in these lines has raised very contrasting opinions. Whereas some critics discard it as “nouveau solipsism,” (Miller 2000, 421), on the more positive side, critic Jeffrey Williams recasts the vogue of personal criticism as a kind of “new belletrism” (Williams 1999, 417). Most autobiographical criticism is personal in tone, emotional, and full of concrete particulars, but it’s also theoretically and historically engaged, confronting many of the reigning academic and social debates. Moreover, although it represents a radical shift in academic writing, its variants owe a good deal to the essay tradition, with its writerly freedom, and much to the second-wave feminist tenet that “the personal is the political” (or the critical, in this case); it owes something to a female psychology that allegedly favors “connected” over “separate” knowing and to a feminist epistemology that sees social location (the nexus of one’s racial, religious, gender, class, geographic, sexual, familial and institutional histories) as necessarily implicated in one’s research (Freedman 1996, 8). Finally, autocritography also reimagines the public for criticism, as a “general” audience that wishes to read “letters” rather than a specialist audience immersed in hardcore academic debates over theory.2 I will proceed to suggest some of the motivations the authors may be moved by when choosing this hybrid form. But let us first give a brief description of our two main books, always bearing in mind that they are all experimental texts that eulogize the constant use of allusion, irony, paradox, and pleasure. And pleasure is what a book of essays should give, according to Woolf’s view of “The Modern Essay”: The principle which controls [the essay] is simply that it should give pleasure; […] Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell 205

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with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last […]. The essay must lap us about and draw its curtain across the world. (Woolf 1992, 40) Rooms of Our Own is one of the many books written by Susan Gubar, the co-author of The Madwoman in the Attic and of No Man’s Land—two texts that radically transformed feminist criticism in America. Obviously taking Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as her model, in a sort of intertextual game, Gubar weaves a provocative tapestry of fact and fancy, feminist criticism and semi-autobiographical fiction, to trace one year in the intellectual life of a middle-aged scholar caught in complex arguments of pedagogy and politics at an unnamed Midwestern university (that could be Indiana, Gubar’s own alma mater) in twenty-first-century America (Henke 2007, 146). Like Woolf’s feminist classic, Rooms of Our Own has six chapters but, unlike its predecessor, it includes several pages of “suggested readings,” in the fashion of academic monographs. In other words, this is the type of text in which criticism is written as fictional autobiography.3 Margaret Atwood and Rosa Montero’s volumes, for their part, belong to the tradition of books written by novelists about the writer’s profession. In other words, they are cases in which autobiography is written, partly, as criticism; a tradition that has been very fruitful in the literary world. We have two new cases of that lucid self-reflexive tradition of writers’ views on writing, to which they add a new freshness and passion in their very personal and subjective revelation of the mysteries of literature since they are really exploring their own personal mysteries. In Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, we find a very similar layout to that of Rooms of Our Own. It consists of six titled chapters, which include endnotes,4 bibliography, acknowledgements, and an index. It, thus, follows the formal structures of an academic book, since it grew, like Woolf‘s A Room of One’s Own, out of the series of Empson lectures that Atwood gave at the University of Cambridge in 2000. The book title points at the fact that all writers learn from the dead, from the work of writers who have preceded them. So, writers will have to deal, sooner or later, with those from previous periods of time; they must “negotiate with the dead.” If Susan Gubar “negotiates” with Virginia Woolf but also with all the women writers to whom she has devoted her scholarship (Jane Austen, the Brontës, Mary Shelley, etc.), Margaret Atwood also devotes many pages to personal ruminations on a wide range of authors, from Dante to American novelist and screenwriter Elmore Leonard. Significantly, transnationalism bridges every line written in these two samples of autocritography. So, why have these women writers opted for autocritography instead of classic autobiography?5 Our writers give us very specific answers that explain their choice. The reason is no other than what the American master of the autobiographical genre, Henry Adams, was seeking in his third-person autobiography The Education of Henry Adams: “distance,” even if their essays are written in the first person. In the last chapter of La loca de la casa, Rosa Montero tells us a story about a cloistered nun and a woman who lived opposite the nun’s convent, on the third floor of an apartment building in an unnamed Spanish town. After thirty years, the cloistered nun leaves her convent and knocks on the door of the third floor apartment asking, “Could I sneak a look from your balcony?” The two women stood out on the balcony for several minutes, staring down at the convent. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” remarked the nun; afterwards she returned to her convent, never again to abandon it (Montero 2003, 270).6 This story may not appear to explain the longest voyage a human being can embark upon; but, for Rosa Montero, it is the perfect symbol for what happens when one writes. Writing a 206

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novel or any kind of autobiographical narrative implies daring to cross that monumental path that distances you from yourself and allows you to observe yourself from afar, as if from a balcony. And, once one has done this supreme effort of self-understanding, once one has touched for an instant the vision that completes and fulminates, Montero proclaims, “we unwillingly return to our cell, to our enclosed individuality, and we try to accept our own death”7 (Montero 2003, 271). The desired distance, thus, is also achieved through the use of symbols or representational synecdoche. As Montero stresses again and again, seeming to follow James Olney’s approach in his book Metaphors of the Self, to reach the largest distance possible between you and what you tell is the wisest position for a writer to adopt; the writer must assume that what she narrates only represents her as a human being, in a deeply symbolic manner,8 “but all of that has nothing to do with the anecdotes of your little life”9 (Montero 2003, 267). That is a second key, I think, to their motivation in choosing the essay form: following in the tradition of Montaigne, our three writers do not wish to be confessional or testimonial; nor are they interested in seeking the events of their “little life.” They are only interested in exploring what represents them: be it specific writers and writing in general, or feminist criticism. I would suggest a third motivation, besides distance and representation. It has to do with autobiography and ethics. In his book The Ethics of Life Writing, Paul John Eakin explains how life writing, in the information age, has meant the transmission of more and more personal information often quite intimate, with less and less restraint (Eakin 2004). At the same time, he identifies some “transgressions” for which self-narrators have been called to account, the most outstanding of which are: misrepresentation of biographical and historical truth, and failure to display normative models of personhood. So, telling the truth, and “displaying normalcy” (whatever “normalcy” means), are two of the prerequisites for telling a life story. If narrative is indeed an identity content, Eakin proceeds to suggest, “then the regulation of narrative carries the possibility of the regulation of identity—a disquieting proposition to contemplate in the context of our culture of individualism” (Eakin 2001, 113–114). If that is the present situation, it seems that our women essayists have decided to avoid problems vis-à-vis the ethics of life writing and have chosen different paths where they can feel free from having their identity “regulated.” Susan Gubar, for example, openly plays and puns with transgression number one, “misrepresentation of biographical and historical truth,” when she clarifies in her first chapter: I will … make use of the license of novelists letting lies proliferate so as to tell a fictitious story about one year of events which shaped my belief that especially those women with sufficient money and rooms of their own face bewildering but unprecedented prospects today. (Gubar 2006, 6) A quote that sounds strikingly similar to that provided by Virginia Woolf at the beginning of A Room of One’s Own: Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact. Therefore I propose, making use of all the liberties and licences of a novelist, to tell you the story of the two days that preceded my coming here. (Woolf 1995, 14) No theoretician of autobiography could have put it more eloquently: sometimes our imagined fictions are more real than autobiographical “truth.” 207

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If we now focus on Eakin’s second infraction, the failure to display normative models of personhood, we read that it refers not so much to a question of what one has done but to what one is: one is judged by others to be lacking in the very nature of one’s being. In our present academic world, it seems that political and academic correctness prescribes certain ethical postures for autobiographers, concerning the group identity they “represent”: certain ways of “being” in the world. It would be considered “the norm,” for example, for certain groups of readers that a woman writer writes as a feminist. Group-identity politics imposes its regulations and punishes its deviations from the norm. But, again, our three writers have their own rules, and the personal essay form provides them with the freedom to express their very personal point of view, regardless of what “normalcy” in their own spheres would indicate; thus perhaps the impact of transnational influence might be discovered here. We could provide many examples of their rejection of “normative models of personhood,” but let us restrict the scope to the feminist issue. In her chapter entitled “Temptation,” on the moral or social responsibility of the writer, Atwood (well-known for her feminist ideas) directly touches upon this issue. So, while at one point she seems to adopt a stance of what could be called “feminist normalcy,” explaining to her readership how: Women writers weren’t included in the Romantic roll-call, and never had a lot of Genius medals stuck onto them; in fact the word “genius” and the word “woman” just don’t really fit together in our language, because the kind of eccentricity expected of male “geniuses” would simply result in the label “crazy,” should it be practiced by a woman. (Atwood 2002, 100) At another point she uses a detached, sarcastic tone when talking about what she calls the “F-word” and describes at length what she considers the characteristically “women writers conundrum”: If you are a woman and a writer, does the combination of gender and vocation automatically make you a feminist, and what does that mean exactly? That you shouldn’t put a good man into your books, even though you may in real life have managed to dig up a specimen or two? (Atwood 2002, 106–107) But the clearest departure from “normalcy” that autocritography provides Gubar is her departure from theory. Atwood hurries to clarify that from the introductory pages, when she states: “I am a writer and a reader, and that’s about it. I’m not a scholar or a literary theoretician, and any such notions that have wandered into this book have got by the usual writerly methods, which resemble the ways of the jackdaw: we steal the shiny bits, and build them into the structures of our own disorderly nests” (Atwood 2002, xix). However, it is not that logical that one of the best-known and most respected feminist scholars in the AngloAmerican academia should produce a book that reads like an open proclamation against theory. In the second chapter of Rooms of Our Own, aptly entitled “Theory Trouble,” Gubar makes fun of the jargon used by theorists when she states: “If I had never understood structuralism, how could I possibly grasp the utility of post-structuralism”? (Gubar 2006, 40) And, in a very playful and mocking tone, she imagines a phantom Professor De M (Paul de Man, maybe?), who symbolizes the French philosopher, writing a book called The Indeterminacy of “Sexual” Difference and whose work involves: “disrupting” or “unravelling”, “subverting” or 208

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“sabotaging” those “hegemonic dualisms” of “phallogocentrism” that had created an illusion of natural phenomena out of the interplay of “undecidable signs” (Gubar 2006, 45). Although her book reads like a novel, Gubar’s Table of Contents reads like a critical theory monograph with titles that parody famous theory texts, like “Theory Trouble” or “Institutionalization and Its Queer Discontents,” thus it is the narrator’s interior monologues on these subjects which share the distinctly interruptive quality of Woolf’s prose, that interweave the abstract and the material in strands which are both elegant and funny. Although the book’s target is to investigate a set of literary or cultural texts and theoretical concepts, it deliberately avoids the normative style and manner of theory in a literary experiment with critical style, including also many of the pleasurable ingredients of narrative fiction (such as the use of rhetorical devices, a setting, characters, dialogue, and a story with a beginning and an end). Gubar often uses Virginia Woolf’s technique of browsing through bookshelves in a library (albeit, this time the “library” is no other than Amazon.com) and the bibliographical discoveries she makes serve as the starting point for her argumentation. In one of these occasions, for example, when she is trying to find books that help her understand how the terms “sex” and “gender” have shifted, she “randomly” comes across the myriad of recently published books about “masculinity.” The distance provided by autocritography allows her to be ironic and humorous again about it, when she says: “For centuries … women have been the most discussed animal in the universe, but now, it seems, teachers and psychologists, journalists and essayists have provoked a tsunami of serious and prophetic, moral and hortatory words about boys, brothers, husbands, fathers, bachelors and uncles” (Gubar 2006, 42). All of this, of course, cannot be read as serious theoretical discourse set against “men’s rights” movements or the like. On the contrary, its expressive sarcasm makes us laugh but, as we laugh, Gubar’s sentences also lead us to reflections on the many evolutions in feminist criticism that she is discussing with the readers. The critique here also suggests that across all boundaries, women should share the concern of whether their lives have been upstaged by the latest trend. Our three texts, then, seem to invoke another institutional turn from theory to a hybrid style of personal writing where the politics are not “theoretical” but intensely “personal.” Over twenty years ago, Barry Olshen proposed the use of three terms in theoretical approaches to autobiography: “subject” (or “autobiographer”); “persona” (the textual signifier or literary subject, entirely constituted by discourse); and “self” (a kind of subjective structure maintaining the subject’s sense of her own identity). Usually, in autobiography, subject, narrator and persona bear the same name. And usually, in critical essays, there is only one almost invisible presence; that of the critic. But our books use complex narrative strategies that resemble fiction or experimental autobiography. “Call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or any name you please,” says the narrator of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (Woolf 1995, 6). And “[h]ere then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please—it is not a matter of any importance),” says the narrator of Susan Gubar’s Rooms of Our Own (Gubar 2006, 14). So, the autobiographical narrator and persona in both cases is an imaginary Mary whose shifting identity gives her a more universal and transnational voice, the voice of any woman writer or scholar. Moreover, if, as Gubar says in her book “‘I’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being” (Gubar 2006, 14), then, who is, really, the “I” that lives and tells the stories in these women’s books? Are they “I’s” of their own? Again, we have to return to what Virginia Woolf said in her own version of autocritography, long before the term had been coined: 209

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But after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar; a shadow shaped something like the letter “I”. […] Back one was always hailed to the letter “I”. One began to be tired of “I”. Not but what this “I” was a most respectable “I”; honest and logical; as hard as a nut, and polished for centuries by good teaching and good feeding. I respect and admire that “I” from the bottom of my heart. But […] the worst of it is that in the shadow of the letter “I” all is shapeless as mist. (Woolf 1995, 104) Only when I re-read this paragraph describing the authoritative voice of the masculine first person pronoun did I realize that Maxine Hong Kingston, 50 years later, borrowed this idea and expressed it in strikingly similar terms in her now classic autobiography The Woman Warrior. The difference being that this time the “hard as a nut” “I” does not represent the male subject, but the American citizen, as opposed to the minoritized Chinese-American immigrant The Chinese “I” has seven strokes, intricacies. How could the American “I”, assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese, have only three strokes, the middle so straight? […] I stared at the middle line and waited so long for its black center to resolve into tight strokes and dots that I forgot to pronounce it. (Kingston 1977, 193) These two quotes prove how a classic of British feminism such as A Room of One’s Own has transnationally influenced not only an American hybrid text in an intertextual game (Gubar’s book), but also a classic of Chinese-American feminism, such as The Woman Warrior. And they also lead us to open the question of how minority writers have embraced the puzzle of identity between their use of the individualist “I” and the collective “we.”

Conclusion I initiated the second part of this chapter saying that I would be describing a somehow unusual genre; all the more unusual and unconventional since I have provided several different names to describe it. The authors themselves are very aware of the peculiar and hybrid nature of their own books, described as “mestizo,” by Rosa Montero (2003, 180), as a “critical bildungsroman” by Gubar (2006, 218), and as a “labyrinth” by Atwood (2002, xiii). Whatever name we wish to give them, it is clear that this recent mode of personal critical writing we have named “autocritography” is not that recent, after all, since its practitioners have “negotiated with the dead,” and have followed the trail left by the masters of essaywriting. Nor is it only an Anglo-American “fashion,” but rather a global one that travels across the Atlantic as my comparative approach has shown. It is, rather, a renewed kind of belletrism that downplays previous claims of quasi-scientific theoretical research, and reasserts, precisely, the distinctive value of the literary, as yielding not practical results but spiritual or aesthetic enjoyment. It is true that one of the greatest strengths of autocritography is its potential effectiveness. Autobiographical elements incorporated into a critical argument become staged events, intended to produce a sincerity of effect. Moreover, personal criticism has unsettled the firm dichotomies of expressivism and objectivity, petite histoire and grand récit, celebrity and invisibility (Veeser 1996, xxii). But let us not be naïve: as we have perceived in our analysis, there 210

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is always a hidden agenda, a calculated effect; and even the apparently most innocent autobiographical narrative conforms to a motivated program of self-representation (Lang 1996, 50). In any case, this is a new trend in life-writing studies that will, undoubtedly, continue to arouse the interest of critics. As we move forward towards a future in which instant, firsthand, visual, and digital life-story telling is valued over distanced reflection, such openmindedness and ability to speak with clarity about our concerns, as well as to listen to the new and emerging discourses we see and hear around us will be more necessary than ever (Jensen 2009, 311). To finish, let me go back to the initial purpose of this comparative analysis across continents and historical periods. As Shelley Fisher Fishkin proclaimed in her presidential address of 2004, “as the transnational figures more prominently in American studies, we will welcome studies that probe the cultural work of American literature outside the United States for insight into the non–US cultures—as well as into the American texts themselves” (Fishkin 2005, 32). This essay, as part of this volume project, then, constitutes a species of “critical internationalism,” a contribution to the internationalization of American Studies through greater attention to the work of Americanists from outside the US, that ultimately aims not so much to reconfigure the object of study itself as to bring “a different range of institutional, disciplinary, and cultural perspectives to bear on it” (Heise 2008, 382).

Notes 1 Terms often overlap. If I use Gates’s term “autocritography” as opposed to Reynolds’s “autobiografiction” it is because, in spite of Reynold’s definition of his term as a composite genre where “the three converging lines—autobiography, fiction and the essay—meet,” our texts are more in line with the definition of “autocritography,” since the emphasis of these works lies on the scholarly critical content they comprise and embrace, and not so much on a fictionalized life story. 2 Some more generic clarifications to avoid confusion: The books under discussion do not join in the also ever-growing list of scholarly or “Academic autobiographies,” if only because their authors (except for Susan Gubar) are not academics in the proper sense of the word (they do not teach on a regular basis at an academic institution). The so-called academic memoirs, those written by academics with influential scholarship and whose memoirs focus on issues of the academy, such as Elaine Showalter (Faculty Towers), Nancy K. Miller (But Enough About Me), Alice Kaplan (French Lessons), or Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (A Dialogue on Love), have been read as the substitute for the fairly exhausted genre of Academic or Campus Novel, in terms of being a window into the academic’s office. That is not the case of our three hybrid books. I say hybrid because they are a mixture of novel, autobiography, personal essay, anti-theoretical literary criticism, and pedagogical explanation. Their authors evidence that the dominant and established mode of literary criticism has moved from the High Theory of the 1970s and 1980s, and from its difficult, more densely philosophical or socialscientific, impersonal tenor, language, and style, to the more experiential, subjective, literary tenor and language of autobiography. 3 This is not the only incursion into life writing undertaken by Susan Gubar. In 2012 she published Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer (Indiana University Press), where she explores the physical and psychological ordeal of living with ovarian cancer, a disease she was diagnosed with in 2008. 4 There are as many as 227 notes (not many doctoral dissertations have such number of notes). Moreover, some of the notes are of the “for more on this subject, see …” type, which gives the essays an even more academic appearance, but it is just an appearance. 5 See Durán (2009) for more on the personal essay as autobiography. 6 “Quería pedirle que me dejara asomarme a su balcón.” “Es hermoso, ¿verdad?” All translations into English of Montero’s quotes are mine. 7 “Regresamos renqueantes a nuestra celda, al encierro de nuestra estrecha individualidad, e intentamos resignarnos a morir” (Montero 2003, 271).

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Isabel Durán 8 This is what Olney also said over 40 years ago in his Metaphors of the Self, yet, more theoretically oriented (Olney 1972). 9 “Pero todo eso no debe tener nada que ver con lo anecdótico de tu pequeña vida” (Montero 2003, 267).

Bibliography Arac, Jonathan. “What Good Can Literary History Do?” American Literary History 20. 1–2 (2008): 1–11. Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. New York: Anchor Books, 2002. Bigsby, Christopher. “What’s an American, Anyway?” Miradas transatlánticas: intercambios culturales entre Estados Unidos y Europa/ Transatlantic Vistas: Cultural Exchanges between the USA and Europe. Eds. Isabel Durán, Carmen Méndez and Jaime de Salas. Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 2011. 113–126. Bourne, Randolph. “Trans-national America.” The Atlantic Monthly 118. 1 (1916): 86–97. Durán, Isabel. “The Personal Essay as Autobiography: A Gender and Genre Approach.” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 58 (2009): 41–65. Eakin, John Paul. “Breaking Rules: The Consequences of Self-Narration.” Biography 24. 1 (2001): 113–127. Eakin, John Paul, ed., The Ethics of Life Writing. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies—Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004.” American Quarterly 57. 1 (2005): 17–57. Freedman, Diane. “Autobiographical Literary Criticism as the New Belletrism.” Confessions of the Critics. Ed. H. Aram Veeser. London: Routledge, 1996. 3–16. Gates, Henry Louis. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Grey, Richard. “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis.” American Literary History 21. 1 (2009): 128–151. Gubar, Susan. Rooms of Our Own. Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 2006. Heise, Ursula. “Ecocriticism and the Transnational Turn in American Studies.” American Literary History 20. 1–2 (2008): 381–404. Henke, Suzette. “Review of Rooms of Our Own, by Susan Gubar.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 26. 1 (2007): 145–147. Hornung, Alfred. “Response to the Presidential Address.” American Quarterly 57. 1 (2005): 67–73. Jensen, Meg. “Separated by a Common Language: The (Differing) Discourses of Life Writing in Theory and Practice.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 24.2 (2009): 299–314. Kaplan, Alice. French Lessons: a Memoir. Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. New York: Vintage, 1977. Lang, Candace. “Autocritique.” Confessions of the Critics. Ed. Aram Veeser. New York: Routledge, 1996. 40–54. Miller, Nancy K. “But enough about me, what do you think of my memoir?” The Yale Journal of Criticism 13. 2 (2000): 421–436. Miller, Nancy K. But Enough About Me. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Montero, Rosa. La loca de la casa. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2003. Olney, James. Metaphors of the Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Olshen, Barry N. “Subject, Persona and Self in the Theory of Autobiography.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 10. 1 (1995): 5–16. Reed, Ishmael. “America: The Multinational Society.” 15 May 2018. academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/modla ng/carasi/via/ViaVol5_1Guest.htm. Reynolds, Stephen. “Autobiografiction.” Speaker 15. 366 (1906): 28–29. Rico, Barbara, and Sandra Mano, eds. American Mosaic: Multicultural Readings in Context. Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1995. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. A Dialogue on Love. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. Showalter, Elaine. Faculty Towers. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

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Transnationalism and autocritography Sowell, Thomas. Ethnic America: A History. New York: Basic Books, 1981. Tompkins, Jane. “Me and My Shadow.” New Literary History 19. 1 (1987): 169–178. Veeser, H. Aram, ed. Confessions of the Critics. London: Routledge, 1996. Williams, Jeffrey. “The New Belletrism.” Style 33. 3 (1999): 414–442. Woolf, Virginia. “The Modern Essay.” A Woman’s Essays. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. Hamonsworth: Penguin, 1992. 40–49. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

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PART IV

Political imaginaries and transnational images of the political

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19 ICONOGRAPHY, INTERPICTORIALITY, AND TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES Udo J. Hebel

When NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong left the first human footprints on the surface of the moon on 21 July 1969, live coverage of the historic moment was radiated to a record TV audience of some 600 million people on all continents of the globe. Photographs of Armstrong and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin hoisting the Star-Spangled Banner in the lunar sand filled the title pages of newspapers and magazines worldwide and soon became iconic representations of the successful mission of the U.S.-American spacecraft Apollo 11 to take its U.S.-American crew outside the earthly sphere for the sake of their small exploratory steps marking a giant leap for mankind. The iconography of the first landing on the moon blended American ideologies of individual and national expansion, progress, and achievement with universal narratives and mythologies of unlimited power, surpassing human boundaries, and literally reaching out for the stars. The pictures of the first human beings on the moon participate in an archive of visual representations of scenes of landing and arrival in American history and culture whose transcultural and transnational trajectories have become intricately interwoven with national (ist) American lineages and traditions of visual self-conceptions over the course of the centuries. Following especially Theodore de Bry’s late sixteenth-century engravings of the transnational moment of the first encounter of Christopher Columbus with the supposedly New World on 12 October 1492, representations of the arrival of the Spaniards in what came to be known as “America” (Figure 19.1) circulated widely throughout Europe since the early modern period of discoveries and conquests and provided the repertoire for innumerous pictorial representations of first encounter scenes with frequently imperialist but always mythologically foundational implications. John Vanderlyn’s historical painting “The Landing of Columbus” (1847) commissioned by the United States Congress for the Rotunda of the Capitol and, especially, Henry Sargent’s less well-known but equally monumental “Landing of the Fathers” (1815) depicting the arrival of the first Puritan immigrants to New England in Plymouth harbor on 22 December 1620 and still on display in Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, MA (Figure 19.2) illustrate the productivity and power of the repertoire in two highly visible representations of the two most conspicuous arrival scenes in 217

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Figure 19.1 Pieter Balthazar Bouttatz, El almirante Christoval Colon descubre la Isla Españ̃ ola Etching, 1728. LC-USZ62–43536. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Washington, D.C.

American history and culture. To which extent their composition, their constellation of figures, their iconographic motifs, and especially their salient gesture of planting a flag as a gesture of appropriation and dominance partake in the transnational storehouse of renditions of arrivals, landings, and conquests in other parts of the world and by colonizing powers other than the Spanish and the British can be illustrated, e.g. by Charles Davidson Bell’s midnineteenth-century painting of the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck in Table Bay as a historical reimagination of the Dutch foundation of Cape Town, South Africa, on 6 April 1652. The possessive gesture of raising the national flag remained productive in American iconography beyond the realm of historical engravings and paintings of scenes of colonial 218

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Figure 19.2 Henry Sargent. Landing of the Pilgrims Painting, 1815; 1818–1822. Courtesy of Pilgrim Hall Museum, Plymouth, MA.

encounters. In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it emerged most prominently in Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of U.S. marines raising the American Flag on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, on 23 February 1945 (Figure 19.3), which marked the strategically important and widely glorified occupation of the Japanese island of Iwo Jima towards the end of World War II in the Pacific and which corresponds in its visual rhetoric and political significance to, e.g. Yevgeny Khaldei’s equally famous photographs of the Soviet flag over various symbolic sites in Berlin, especially over the German Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate, in early May 1945. The act of raising the national U.S.-American flag re-emerged with recognizable reverberations of the historical moment of the conquest of Iwo Jima after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 when Thomas E. Franklin’s photograph of New York fire-fighters setting up an American flag in Ground Zero circulated to the medially connected world a message of ideological affirmation, military determination, patriotic glory, and envisioned future victory at a moment of collective insecurity and national crisis—a visual statement of self-confidence and self-assurance that was soon incorporated into the archive of collective American memory via a 45-cent postal stamp. The power and impact of Franklin’s 9/11 picture as well as the political clout and cultural capital of the historical paintings and photographs of scenes of colonial American encounters and American explorations in space result to a considerable extent from their investment with the semiotic and semantic potential of the transnational and transcultural iconographic archives they emerge from and participate in. The iconic pictures introduced in the previous 219

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Figure 19.3 Joe Rosenthal. U.S. Soldiers Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima Photograph, 23 Feb. 1945. ARC 520748. National Archives Catalog.

interpictorial cluster indicate in a paradigmatic manner how projections of “America” and representations of “Americans” are quite frequently and conspicuously embedded in a wide array of visual traditions, conventions, exchanges, and repertoires whose potential of signification and meaning transcends their specific American contexts and archives (see Groseclose and Wierich 2009; Hebel 2013, 2015; Sperling 2011). The scope and depth of their complex semiotic structure and semantic potential rather show affinities with defining ideas and perspectives of Transnational American Studies (see Fishkin 2005; Hebel 2012). Metaphors of America and the United States as a crossroads and turntable of different and multifarious cultures as well as concepts of the spaces, processes, and products of “American” culture as participating in and entangled by global mobilities, transcontinental exchanges, and intercultural flows provide promising perspectives and approaches for interpictorial readings of iconic pictures of “America” as crossroads and trajectories of transnational iconographies. *** Visual representations of “America” and visual constructions of “American” identities and U.S.-American ideologies had long been an integral part of the interdisciplinary cultural studies agenda and cultural history project of American Studies when W.J.T. Mitchell proclaimed what came to be known as the iconic turn or pictorial turn in the early 1990s. Nevertheless, Mitchell’s emphasis on the agency, functionality, and historical and cultural 220

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specificity of images has supported the emergence—in view of developments in Art History in general and German Bildwissenschaft in particular (see Alexander et al. 2012; Böhm 2006, 2015; Sachs-Hombach 2009; Schulz 2009), the re-emergence—of notions, concepts, and practices of iconography (see Baert 2012; Büttner 2017; Eisner and Lorenz 2012; Grbich 2015; KoppSchmidt 2004; Poeschel 2010; Taylor 2008). Individual items of visual culture, including timehonored masterpieces of allegedly singular artistry and standing, are considered as intricately located in corresponding, at times competing if not conflicting iconographic traditions and cultural imaginaries. The interest of iconographic approaches in the position of the individual work of visual art in diachronic and synchronic networks of repertoires and conventions can be taken to relate to the focus of American Studies on context, situation, and function, even more so within the theoretical frames of Transnational American Studies and their perspectives on the transcultural flow and circulation of cultural products, the transnational interwovenness of national discourses, and the position, role, and perception of the United States in the world. It is in these larger contexts that the concept of interpictoriality engages the historical and cultural mobility of powerful pictures as well as the possible political and social impact and function of particular images and repertoire conventions at large. It foregrounds visual dialogs, exchanges, and negotiations whose diverse manifestations have long been considered in Art History in terms and categories such as, e.g. imitation, parody, quotation, variation. Similar to notions of intertextuality and intermediality, interpictoriality goes beyond the mere documentation and description of sources, relations, and influences; it rather emphasizes the semiotic and semantic implications of the frame(s) of reference and of the act(s) of signification added to the respective image by means of its interpictorial rhetoric (see Isekenmeyer 2013; Hebel 2015; Rose 2011; Von Rosen 2003). The interpictorial reading of a specific visual representation underscores the functionality and interpretive value of the semantic surplus produced by its participation in and, particularly significant, possible transformation and resignification of larger visual and cultural conventions, repertoires, traditions, and archives. In terms of their semiotic structure, interpictorially charged pictures are hybrid systems of signification with both referential and symbolic functions. They are semantically determined and indeterminate at the same time and they contain within their own material sites and frames a possibly limitless network of multi-layered, palimpsest-like options for re-cognition. Interpictorially charged visuals can be considered metapictures which, by their very definition and composition, complicate assumptions about the immediate accessibility and comprehension of pictures and which may expose the possibly manipulative structures and strategies of their own uses. Interpictorially loaded representations are tangible sites and manifestations of the historical and cultural circulation and exchange of motifs, repertoires, and conventions, and they are themselves material agents and performative enactments in processes of cultural and intercultural transfer and negotiation. The concept of interpictoriality is therefore particularly well suited to make Transnational American Studies explorations of national and transnational American narratives and their political, social, economic, and cultural implications interact with the concerns of Art History and Visual Culture Studies with iconographic conventions, traditions, and archives. The practice of interpictorial readings reflects approaches to iconography and iconology as developed most influentially by Erwin Panofsky between 1932 and 1955, i.e., initially while he was still living and working in Germany and then mainly after his transatlantic exile and immigration to America in the wake of the Nazi reign of terror. Panofsky outlines an interpretive trajectory that moves in three stages from the pre-iconographical description of recognizable empirical givens and experiences in the picture under consideration, to the iconographical tracing and documentation of the representational conventions, motif clusters, and archival repertoires it is embedded in, and, finally, to the iconological interpretive 221

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synthesis exploring its possible meaning and significance as well as cultural, social, and political impact. Interpictorial relations are established and analysed on Panofsky’s second and third stages and are located between what Panofsky calls iconographic and iconological interpretation. Panofsky’s perspectives and procedures enhance our understanding of interpictorially charged pictures as both storehouses and generators of meaning. Interpictorially charged pictures partake actively—in a culturally, socially, and politically significant way by means of their very enactment of remembering and inscribing—in the visual archives and memories of their own culture and, possibly, in the visual archives and discourses of other cultures. The interpretive practices stress the political and cultural agency and performativity of interpictorially charged pictures (see Hebel 2011; Wulf and Zirfas 2005), which may be further enhanced in and by particular situations and contexts of display. The individual picture as the material site and repository of possible networks of interpictorial references and relations is a tangible crossroads in the otherwise immaterial and intangible cultural and transcultural mobility and flow of images, cultural imaginaries, and political iconographies. The prismatic condensation of the individual picture and the semiotic trajectories of its composition (see Kress and van Leeuwen 2006; Sturken and Cartwright 2009) contain and project venues for the exploration of (explicit or implicit) processes of generating and transferring meaning and thus for the interpretation of possible processes of cultural and political resignification and re-evaluation. Interpictorial readings perform acts of (re-)situating and (re-)location and aim at revealing the national and possibly transnational contexts and presuppositions governing the visual rhetoric of specific pictures. Interpictorial readings are particularly significant in regard to historical paintings, many of which are as culturally and nationally defining as the examples given above, and in regard to iconic photographs, for whose visibility, prominence, and agency Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites coined the evident description “no caption needed”

Figure 19.4 John Paul Filo. Mary Ann Vecchio Kneeling over Jeffrey Miller during Kent State Protest Photograph, 4 May 1970. Time 100 Photos.

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Figure 19.5 Interpictorial Cluster around John Paul Filo’s Photograph of 4 May 1970 Design by the Author.

and which German critic Michael Diers appropriately calls Schlagbilder following photography theorist and photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson’s notion of “the decisive moment.” The example of John Paul Filo’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the Kent State University shooting of 4 May 1970 (Figure 19.4) may serve to illustrate how the iconicity of famous American pictures results from and functions within their particularly given and recognizable historical and cultural contexts and parameters and, at the same time, contains and passes on transnational and transcultural archives with virtually no limits. Filo’s photograph of the fatally wounded student Jeffrey Miller and the desperately screaming student Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling next to him during the violent clash of anti-war protesters and National Guard troops on the Kent State Commons is an “American” picture visibly and recognizably anchored in the cultural matrix of its own specific times, spaces, and conflicts (see Orvell 2003; Kroes 2007). Simultaneously, its obvious allusions to Michelangelo’s Pietà of 1498–1500 and the momentous repertoire emerging from the artist’s proverbial Madonna sculpture underscore and foreground the photograph’s transcultural dimensions and transnational implications (also see Szlezák 2016). The interpictorial cluster informing and framing Filo’s photograph, including similarly iconic photographs, e.g. by Jürgen Henschel of the killing of German student protester Benno Ohnesorg in Berlin on 2 June 1967, by Sam Nzima of the killing of twelveyear-old Hector Pieterson during the high school student uprising in Soweto, South Africa on 16 June 1976, or by Samuel Aranda of the suffering of a severely wounded young man in Sana’a during protests against the authoritarian regime in Yemen on 15 October 2011, relates the visual representation of the decisive historical moment on the campus of Kent State University not only to various embodiments of the transcultural topos of motherly and female suffering and comforting but also to transnational iconographies of political protest and civic activism (Figure 19.5). The complex allusiveness of John Paul Filo’s photograph illustrates how interpictorial readings transcend comparative approaches towards more multidirectional transangular perspectives (see Bauridl and Hebel 2014). *** 223

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The location of interpictorially charged American images as materially framed repositories and prisms at the crossroads of the circulation, exchange, and negotiation of specific national iconographies (see Haselstein and Ostendorf 2003; Hebel and Wagner 2011; Reynolds and Hutner 2000; Warnke et al. 2011), on the one hand, and larger transcultural and transnational traditions, repertoires, and archives, on the other, can be traced in an exemplary fashion in visual representations of the most transnational of Americans, the U.S.-American president. From the official portraits of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart to the pictorial enactments of the presidency of Barack Obama by former Chief Official White House Photographer and Director of the White House Photo Office, Pete Souza, and into the presidency of Donald Trump, visual representations of American presidents have been politically and ideologically motivated constructions frequently determined by a high degree of national American and transnational interpictoriality. The earliest iconic portrait of an American president, Gilbert Stuart’s Lansdowne Portrait of George Washington of 1796, is certainly momentous in its depiction of the first American president as the prototypical republican citizen serving the newly established democracy and the American people as their elected leader for the constitutional duration of his term in office. The national political imaginaries and iconographies at work in Stuart’s painting gain in meaning and ideological significance in view of Allan Ramsay’s official portrait of George III of 1761/62, which, in obvious contrast and with contrary impetus, is deeply steeped in the iconographic conventions of European monarchical portrait art and in the political and social presuppositions of hereditary royalty (see Depkat 2014). The presidential iconography of Barack Obama, beginning during the 2008 election campaign and throughout the eight years of his two presidential terms of office, draws significantly from interpictorial frameworks and correspondences which underscore historical lineages and political affinities especially with former presidents Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy and their respective agendas, affiliations, and legacies (see Hebel, “Framing Obama”). What makes the iconography of Barack Obama and his presidency—both perceived as particularly transnational and transcultural by Alfred Hornung—noteworthy in the context of Transnational American Studies is the complex interplay of national American iconographies and imaginaries with transcultural and transnational trajectories additionally evoked by interpictorial references and allusions. Thus, when President Obama was confronted with the need to show competent disaster handling in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, his visit to the Louisiana coast on 28 May 2010 was accompanied by pictures that were to present the president in positions of compassionate agency, albeit symbolical and easily recognizable as part of a well-staged choreography. Widely circulated photographs of President Obama at Port Fourchon Beach, LA, show the president bending down in a posture of genuine interest and concern, physically in touch with the immediate consequences of the ecological catastrophe, and supposedly working on the same ground level together with the people along the Gulf Coast shoreline. In its compositional focus on the almost kneeling president and on his pose of concern and compassion, Chuck Kennedy’s official White House picture (Figure 19.6) in particular resembles Cecil Stoughton’s photograph of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s visit to the home of the Fletcher family in Inez County, KY, on 24 April 1964 as part of Johnson’s “war on poverty”-campaign (Figure 19.7). Within the realm of national American political and cultural iconographies, the interpictorial evocation of Stoughton’s photograph places Barack Obama in the tradition of Democratic presidents and their work for the improvement of the living conditions of the common American people. The one element in the various and differently detailed photographs of President Obama’s visit to Port Fourchon Beach that is additionally significant in the context of interpictorial implications and iconographies is the pair of shoes President Obama is wearing, seemingly accidental and without the laces fully tied. That a shoe is not just a shoe when it gets to the 224

Figure 19.6 Chuck Kennedy. President Barack Obama at Port Fourchon Beach, LA, 28 May 2010 Official White House Photograph, P052810CK-0235

Figure 19.7 Cecil Stoughton. President Lyndon B. Johnson with Fletcher Family in Inez, KY Photograph, 24 April 1964. LBJ Presidential Library, C293–1-64.

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American president and his family and administration but rather an indication, if not a symbol of (in)appropriateness and (in)sensibility, became only all-too evident in the immediate social media reactions to Melania Trump’s choice of first stilettos and then white sneakers during President Donald Trump’s visit to hurricane-stricken Texas on 29 August 2017 (see The New York Times 2017). From the perspective of American cultural history, President Obama’s working shoes in the Port Fourchon Beach pictures as part of his working apparel may be taken as an allusion to Walker Evans’ iconic photographs of field workers, their poor living conditions, and, repeatedly, their working shoes as taken in Hale County, AL, in 1936 and later prominently included in James Agee’s and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men of 1941. The reference to Walker Evans’ photographs inscribes Chuck Kennedy’s picture and the other photographs taken of President Obama on Port Fourchon Beach in the visual archive of American social photography of the 1930s and its respective ideological implications and presuppositions. This very visual repertoire had already framed Stoughton’s photograph of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Its repeated evocation in 2010 makes Barack Obama even more look like a common man president in the traditions of the Democratic Party and subtly underscores the affinities between Barack Obama and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In addition to U.S.-American political and cultural iconographies, President Obama’s shoes on the Louisiana Gulf Coast beach and their allusion to Walker Evans’ photographs of working shoes (see Hebel 2015, 404–408; Hebel 2016, 342–345) may also activate more farreaching, transcultural, and transangular links and point to Vincent Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of shoes of 1886 as a possible interpictorial frame of reference for Chuck Kennedy’s photograph and other Port Fourchon Beach pictures of President Obama. Van Gogh’s painting has given rise to numerous interpretations by, e.g. Martin Heidegger, Meyer Shapiro, and Jacques Derrida, which emphasize, in different ways and on different philosophical and existential premises, Van Gogh’s artistically reductive representation of the human condition (see Batchen 2009). Considered in such interpictorially evoked transcultural and multidirectional contexts, Obama’s social work on the Louisiana Gulf Coast takes on more universal dimensions. The U.S.-American president and Nobel Prize Winner of 2009 is rendered not only as caring for the American people at a moment of crisis but as shouldering the existential burden of the globalized world. Pete Souza’s photograph of President Obama on the steps of the terrace of the U.S. Ambassador’s residence in Paris on 7 June 2009 (Figure 19.8) depicts the U.S.-American president also on the ground, yet not at home but abroad. The interpictorial potential of Souza’s widely-reproduced photograph challenges conventional vertical poses of rulers and monarchs by the representation of the U.S.-American president in a relaxed, reclining pose and by the implications of a non-hierarchical conversation and democratic order which is particularly supported by the depiction of one advisor wearing casual clothes and sneakers. Souza’s interpictorially loaded picture plays with time-honored European visual traditions and repertoires which render monarchs and leaders of different kinds surrounded by their mostly subservient and anything but casually clad advisors. It furthermore evokes Raphael’s fresco “The School of Athens” of 1509–11 (Figure 19.9) whose interpictorial trajectory makes the reclining Obama become the lying Diogenes surrounded in an almost intimate constellation by his closest advisors, just like Diogenes is surrounded by the giants of ancient philosophy in Raphael’s iconic rendition. The extent to which interpictorial strategies have continuously governed transnationally significant visualizations of Barack Obama from his first presidential campaign, throughout his presidency, and into his activities as a former president is borne out by photographs of his 226

Figure 19.8 Pete Souza. President Obama outside the U.S. Ambassador’s Residence, Paris, 7 June 2009 Official White House Photograph, P060709PS-0186.

Figure 19.9 Raphael. The School of Athens. Fresco, 1509–11 Apostolic Palace, Vatican City.

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Figure 19.10 Pete Souza. President Barack Obama at the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, 19 June 2013 Official White House Photograph, P061913PS-1195.

visits to Berlin in 2008, 2013, and 2017. Ever since President John F. Kennedy’s visit to Berlin in June 1963 produced globally iconic and widely recycled photographs of his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in front of the Rathaus Schöneberg and of his quasimythic tour of the divided city and the area around the Brandenburg Gate, his successors in office over a time period of more than 50 years have been keen to follow him with equally successful visits to Berlin and with equally iconic pictures at the Brandenburg Gate (see Bauridl 2014; Mack 2013). While still on the campaign trail in June 2008, the presidential candidate Barack Obama was only allowed to speak at the Siegessäule by the German government and thus only in distant view of the preferred location of the Brandenburg Gate. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s visit to Berlin, President Obama finally spoke publicly from a platform in front of the Brandenburg Gate on 19 June 2013 (Figure 19.10) and could thus be visualized with the desired transnational symbol of American ideologies and values of freedom and democracy looming large and conspicuously in the background (see Frame 2012). When former president Barack Obama visited Berlin again for the Deutsche Evangelische Kirchentag in the year of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation on 25 May 2017, photographs of a welcoming crowd at the Brandenburg Gate inscribed the repeated visit into the visual archive of U.S.-American presidential travels to Berlin and at the same time established a stark contrast to rather different pictures of current U.S. President Donald Trump visiting the NATO headquarters at Brussels on the very same day and, later in early July, attending the 2017 G 20 summit in the German city of Hamburg. *** The practice of interpreting interpictorial “American” pictures and of tracing and mapping interpictorial clusters informing and governing representations of “America” and of “Americans” blends approaches and perspectives of iconography and iconology with the emphasis of Transnational American Studies on trajectories of mobility and impact 228

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and on processes and products of appropriation and transformation across and beyond culturally and nationally given or enforced boundaries (see Greenblatt et al. 2010; Kunow 2011). Janice Radway’s stress on “intricate interdependencies,” Jane Desmond’s notion of “prismatic American Studies,” and Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s call for the development of transnational Deep Maps (Digital Palimpsest Mapping Projects / DPMP; see Fishkin 2012) suggest conceptual affinities between the theoretical parameters of Transnational American Studies and Aby Warburg’s monumental project of a “picture atlas Mnemosyne” as the historical and academic starting point for iconographical and iconological studies in early twentieth-century Europe. Interpictorial readings explore the semiotic and semantic potential and agency of visual representations beyond the site and boundaries of their own enclosing frame and materiality. They reveal the mobility and circulation of transnational iconographic conventions, repertoires, and memories within and across the repositories of “American” pictures, iconographies, and visual archives; they uncover transcultural trajectories of impact, scrutinize processes of appropriation and reappropriation, and address the political significance of possible enactments of interpictorial signification and resignification. Engaging powerful “American” pictures and the political, social, and cultural agency of U.S.-American national iconographies within the conceptual and theoretical framework of Transnational American Studies foregrounds the transnational interwovenness of national American visual discourses and the position and role of “American” pictures and pictures of “Americans” in the globalized world. In its edition of 7 July 2017, in the midst of heated controversies over President Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border, the Los Angeles Times reported that the infamous California Department of Transportation road sign designed by Caltrans graphic artist and member of the Navajo nation John Hood and put up along Interstate 5 in 1990 in order to alert drivers to the possible danger of Mexican immigrants crossing the lanes of southern California freeways on their way into the United States had all but disappeared (see Carcamo 2017). Once the last single sign still standing in the summer of 2017 would also have gone, be it because of an accident, a storm, or a protest action, the iconic sign would not be replaced – and so it happened as the Los Angeles Times reported on 10 February 2018 (see Morrissey). What had become the site and agent of widespread interpictorial parody, projection, and protest of a most diversified quality, mediality, and materiality immediately following its first and contested erection—and what has been included by means of a photographic documentation in the archival exhibition of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History as a lasting metaphor for undocumented immigration to the United States—may be taken as a visual rendition and framing of an “American” transnational arrival scene of a different kind, context, and iconicity. Its continued interpictorial manifestations and reverberations will remember and possibly transform both the original visual representation and the specific political ideologies and cultural perceptions from which it emerged even though the actual last road sign has now vanished.

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Udo J. Hebel Bauridl, Birgit M. Rev. “Kennedy in Berlin by Ulrich Mack (2013).” Journal für Kunstgeschichte 3 (2014): 299–310. Bauridl, Birgit M., and Udo J. Hebel. “South Africa and the United States in Transnational American Studies: From Comparative Approaches toward Transangulation.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 59 (2014): 455–461. Böhm, Gottfried. Was ist ein Bild. 4th ed. Paderborn: Fink, 2006. Böhm, Gottfried. Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen: Die Macht des Zeigens. Wiesbaden: Berlin University Press, 2015. Büttner, Frank, and Andrea Gottdang. Einführung in die Ikonographie: Wege zur Deutung von Bildinhalten. 3rd ed. München: Beck, 2017. Carcamo, Cindy. “With Only One Left, Iconic Yellow Road Sign Showing Running Immigrants Now Borders on the Extinct.” Los Angeles Times, 7 July 2017. Cartier-Bresson, Henri. The Decisive Moment. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952. Depkat, Volker. “Von Georg III. zu George Washington: Überlegungen zur Visualisierung von Legitimität im Übergang von Monarchie zu Demokratie.” Kommunikation und Kulturtransfer im Zeitalter der Personalunion zwischen Großbritannien und Hannover. Ed. Arnd Reitemeier. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag, 2014. 57–78. Desmond, Jane. “Towards a Prismatic American Studies.” Safundi 8. 1 (2007): 5–13. Diers, Michael. Schlagbilder: Zur politischen Ikonographie der Gegenwart. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1997. Eisner, Jas, and Katharina Lorenz. “The Genesis of Iconology.” Critical Inquiry 38. 3 (2012): 483–512. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies.” American Quarterly 57. 1 (2005): 17–57. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Mapping Transnational American Studies.” Transnational American Studies. Ed. Udo J. Hebel. Heidelberg: Winter, 2012. 31–74. Frame, Gregory. “Seeing Obama, Projecting Kennedy: The Presence of JFK in Images of Barack Obama.” Comparative American Studies 10. 2–3 (2012): 163–176. Greenblatt, Stephen, et al. Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Grbich, Carol. Iconology and Iconography: Describing, Classifying and Interpreting Religious and Artistic Objects. London: Sage, 2015. Groseclose, Barbara, and Jochen Wierich, eds. Internationalizing the History of American Art. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. Hariman, Robert, and John Louis Lucaites. No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Haselstein, Ulla, Berndt Ostendorf and Peter Schneck, eds. Iconographies of Power: The Politics and Poetics of Visual Representation. Heidelberg: Winter, 2003. Hebel, Udo J. “Replacing the President: Cecil Stoughton’s ‘Lyndon B. Johnson Taking the Oath of Office’ and the Iconography of U.S. American Presidential Inaugurations.” Pictorial Cultures and Political Iconographies: Approaches, Perspectives, Case Studies from Europe and America. Eds. Udo J. Hebel and Christoph Wagner. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2011. 291–313. Hebel, Udo J. ed. Transnational American Studies. Heidelberg: Winter, 2012. Hebel, Udo J. “Interpikturale Dialoge in der amerikanischen Malerei und Fotografie: Beobachtungen zu einem Arbeitsfeld der American Studies nach dem Iconic Turn.” Bilder sehen: Perspektiven der Bildwissenschaft. Eds. Marc Greenlee et al. Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2013. 155–172. Hebel, Udo J. “‘American’ Pictures and (Trans-)National Iconographies: Mapping Interpictorial Clusters in American Studies.” American Studies Today. Ed. Winfried Fluck et al. Heidelberg: Winter, 2014. 401– 431. Hebel, Udo J. “Framing Obama: Interpictorial Iconographies of an American President.” Obama and Transnational American Studies. Ed. Alfred Hornung. Heidelberg: Winter, 2016. 327–351. Hebel, Udo J., and Christoph Wagner, eds. Pictorial Cultures and Political Iconographies: Approaches, Perspectives, Case Studies from Europe and America. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2011. Hornung, Alfred, “ChinAmerica: Intercultural Relations for a Transnational World.” Transnational American Studies. Ed. Udo J. Hebel. Heidelberg: Winter, 2012. 13–30. Hornung, Alfred, ed. Obama and Transnational American Studies. Heidelberg: Winter, 2016. Isekenmeyer, Guido, ed. Interpiktorialitat: Theorie und Geschichte der Bild-Bild-Bezüge. Bielefeld: transcript, 2013. Kopp-Schmidt, Gabriele. Ikonographie und Ikonologie. Köln: Böhlau, 2004. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2006.

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Iconography, interpictoriality, and TAS Kroes, Rob. Photographic Memories: Private Pictures, Public Images, and American History. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2007. Kunow, Rüdiger. “American Studies as Mobility Studies: Some Terms and Constellations.” Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies. Eds. Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2011. 245–264. Mack, Ulrich. Kennedy in Berlin: Die Deutschlandreise 1963. Ed. Hans-Michael Koetzle. München: Hirmer, 2013. Mitchell, W.J.T. Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Mitchell, W.J.T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Mitchell, W.J.T. What Do Pictures Want? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Morrissey, Kate. “Last of Iconic Illegal Immigration Crossing Signs Has Vanished in California.” Los Angeles Times, 10 February 2018. Orvell, Miles. American Photography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Orvell, Miles. Photography in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Panofsky, Erwin. “Introduction.” Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1939. 3–17. Panofsky, Erwin. “Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst.” Logos 21 (1932): 103–119. Panofsky, Erwin. “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art.” Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History. New York: Doubleday, 1955. 26–54. Poeschel, Sabine, ed. Ikonographie. Darmstadt: WBG, 2010. Radway, Janice. “What’s in a Name? Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, 20 November 1998.” American Quarterly 51. 1 (1999): 1–32. Reynolds, Larry J., and Gordon Hutner, eds. National Imaginaries, American Identities: The Cultural Work of American Iconography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Rose, Margaret A. Pictorial Irony, Parody, Pastiche: Comic Interpictoriality in the Arts of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Bielefeld: Aiesthesis, 2011. Sachs-Hombach, Klaus, ed. Bildtheorien: Anthropologische und kulturelle Grundlagen des Visualistic Turn. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009. Schulz, Martin. Ordnungen der Bilder: Eine Einführung in die Bildwissenschaft. 2nd ed. München: Fink, 2009. Sperling, Joy. “Reframing the Study of American Visual Culture: From National Studies to Transnational Digital Networks.” Journal of American Culture 34. 1 (2011): 26–35. Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Szlezák, Klara Stephanie. “Old Masters’ Madonnas in ‘New World’ Photographs: Instances and Impact of Interpictoriality in Lewis W. Hine’s Photography.” Journal of Transnational American Studies 7. 1 (2016): 1–24. Taylor, Paul. Iconographies without Texts. London: Warburg Institute, 2008. The New York Times. “Melania Trump, Off to Texas, Finds Herself on Thin Heels.” 29 August 2017. Von Rosen, Valeska. “Interpikturalität.” Metzler Lexikon Kunstwissenschaft. Ed. Ulrich Pfisterer. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003. 161–164. Warburg, Aby. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Ed. Martin Warnke. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000. Warnke, Martin, et al., eds. Handbuch der politischen Ikonographie. München: Beck, 2011. Wulf, Christoph, and Jörg Zirfas, eds. Ikonologie des Performativen. München: Fink, 2005.

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20 THE VISUAL AESTHETICS OF PRIVACY IN AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS AND ITS TRANSATLANTIC INFLUENCE Karsten Fitz

Introduction When comparing German and American political culture, especially the culture of election campaigns, what strikes the observer is the much higher media interest in the private lives of American political candidates, especially their family lives. This holds particularly true for the president: In the United States, personal character traits are often taken as evidence of the candidates’ political qualities and, by extension, of their credibility, trustworthiness, and authenticity. This context, in turn, automatically requires a display of the private life—including the marriage and immediate family—of the potential leader of the country in order to demonstrate their allegedly apolitical, but nevertheless politically relevant qualities. Since the majority of the American public sees a direct link between a candidate’s private life and his/her public office, the boundaries between the private and the public sphere in the highest office become blurred. In this sense, a candidate’s private life seems to serve as a form of authentication of his/her anticipated public virtue when in office. Such a high degree of interest in the private and public images of the president in the United States would not make for similarly appealing stories in Germany, however, because, unless a candidate is involved in criminal activities, the public majority considers the private lives of politicians as largely irrelevant to their political capabilities.1 Although there might be a slight change under way since Gerhard Schroeder’s chancellorship (Holtz-Bacha 2001), the private life of politicians remains of comparatively little interest and, thus, needs little staging. By contrast, because the private life is so highly relevant in US political culture, it requires careful staging.2 In this article, I will address the following questions: What does the American public see reflected in the candidate’s private life? What do American voters gain—or presume to gain—by translating the candidate’s private life into the public sphere? Which deeply rooted values and convictions are these expectations and projections based on? How does this interest in the private lives of political leaders impact US-American political culture and the interaction of politics and the media? Finally, revisiting the opening remarks, how have these concerns influenced European political culture? 232

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By mainly focusing on the visual dimension, i.e., largely photographic representations, I will discuss the strategies employed by American presidents and presidential candidates for the staging of privacy in what is actually a public sphere. While these images of privacy are undoubtedly staged/performed constructions, they still need to be appropriate for the particular needs of the time and transmit an air of authenticity and credibility (Cornog 2004, 68; Fitz 2015). Thus, images of staged privacy of American political leaders reveal much about American political culture and the dynamics between the private and public realms at the time of their production. In other words, they reflect a reciprocal rather than a dichotomous relationship between the private and the public. Approaching this subject from a distant, transatlantic perspective, three aspects have to be kept in mind as set preconditions. First, while in Germany, as in many other European countries, the legal protection of the right to privacy traditionally supersedes other concerns, in the United States the interest of an informed public is often given priority over a politician’s right to exercise their right to privacy. This is, of course, particularly true in the case of celebrities; the public has a legitimately higher interest and claims a right to be informed in these instances. This aspect is particularly relevant for American politicians, most of all the American president (Schroeder 2004). Second, in this context, the production of the public image of presidential candidates and of the president, in particular, serves, from its inception, to plot a narrative, to tell a wellcrafted story (Cornog 2004, 68; Fitz 2015). Apart from long-established partisan affiliation, which lately has become a less firm basis for their voting behavior, voters base their final decision to support a presidential candidate or to elect a president for a second term extensively on this story. Third, certain systemic aspects, which will not be commented on in depth here, help facilitate the uniquely American approach to political culture, which is sometimes referred to as the “imperial presidency” (Schlesinger 2004): a presidential system in which the head of state, chief executive, and commander-in-chief are concentrated in one person; a two-party structure with the single-member district plurality congressional electoral system; campaigns that can last for up to eighteen months; and, lastly, the fact that the United States is a world power, so the American president is usually considered to be the leader of the Western world.3

The president as national symbol Karlyn Campbell summarizes the issue of the First Family as national symbol as follows: As head of state, symbol of the nation, a figurehead who represents the country at home and abroad, the presidency is idealized, and its occupants and their families become models or culture types. They are Mr. and Mrs. America, an ideal First Family expected to represent cherished U.S. values. (Campbell 1996, 188) Robert Denton similarly speaks of the president as the “embodiment of the nation” (Denton 1982, 49)—both domestically and to the outside world. Thus, in a sense, the president, according to Louis Brownlow, represents “what we are” as Americans (Brownlow 1969, 36). Only by identifying the president in these terms does it become clearer why his private life has such high significance. Similarly, these statements support why, within the American civil religion, the president is often referred to in quasi-religious terms. 233

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For the President is king in the sense of being the symbolic and decisive focal point of national power and destiny. The President is prophet in the sense of being the chief interpreter of national self-understanding and defining future endeavors. He is priest in the sense of incarnating the nation’s value, aspirations, and expressing these through his behavior. (Novak 1992, 50–52; Hart 2005) Such a quasi-religious dimension can hardly be found in any other Western democracy. At the same time, however, and this certainly has a paradoxical connotation, the American public wants to see the president as “one of them”—that is, a fairly “common man.” Thus, he or she has to bridge the gap between being exceptional and common at the same time, as presidential historian Thomas Cronin describes this phenomenon: We like to think that America is the land where the common sense of the common person reigns. We prize the common touch, the up-from-the-log-cabin “man of the people.” Yet few of us settle for anything but an uncommon performance from our presidents. […] It has been said that the American people crave to be governed by a president who is greater than anyone else but not better than anyone else. We are inconsistent; we want our president to be one of the folks but also something special. […] We cherish the myth that everyone can grow up to be president—that there are no barriers, no elite qualifications—but we don’t want a person who is too ordinary. Would-be presidents have to prove their special qualifications—their excellence, their stamina, their capacity for uncommon leadership. […] A president or would-be president must be bright but not too bright, warm and accessible but not too folksy, down to earth but not pedestrian. […] We persist […] in wanting an uncommon common man as president. (Cronin 1975, 13–14) Many commentators accused Barack Obama of coming across as too intellectual and, thus, too aloof to relate to for the average American (Zuckerman 2014), indicating that the contradiction mentioned by Cronin is deeply rooted in American political culture—and at the same time hard to avoid. These concerns suggest that certain elements of the moral role-model function of the American president go back to the Puritan roots in America. John Winthrop’s idea of the “city upon a hill” undoubtedly includes a claim to moral uprightness, which implies that the political leaders of the community, especially in a theocracy like early New England, are the brightest shining examples of moral integrity and a bulwark against the corruption of Old World decadence. I want to focus here on the claim to virtuousness as it emerged from the strongest source of this phenomenon of high moral standards: The American Revolution. As John Adams phrased it in 1776: “Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private [virtue], and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics” (Adams 2014, 437). Adams directly goes on to explain that, by the same token, the private good has to be subordinated to the public good: There must be a possitive [sic] Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty. And this public Passion must be Superiour to all private Passions. Men must be ready, they must pride themselves, and be happy to sacrifice their private Pleasures, Passions, and Interests, nay their 234

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private Friendships and dearest Connections, when they Stand in Competition with the Rights of society. (Adams 2014, 437) It is precisely this revolutionary context and the value system of the Early Republic that facilitated the blurring of the private and public realms. In other words, if the private good was subordinated to the public good, then the political leaders in the newly founded nation also had to subordinate their private lives to the public good, and thus their private sphere to the public realm. In fact, this facilitates—even demands—to consider the private life of political leaders as the reflection of their larger virtues per se. As we know from such foundational texts as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and Thomas Jefferson’s The Declaration of Independence, King George III, the English king, was considered the embodiment of the moral decline of Britain in the same vein as George Washington was seen as the embodiment of virtue.4 Thus, Washington came to be perceived as model citizen and served as an ideal for future generations of political leaders in the newly founded Republic. The most important concept in this context is the ideal of Republican Citizenship. It has served as a powerful cultural ideology in the United States since the emergence of American political culture during the American Revolution and it persists despite modernization. The fact that George Washington was frequently hailed—and is often represented—as American Cincinnatus during the revolutionary period and the Early Republic, demonstrates how closely the private and the public spheres have always been connected in American politics.5 Although the selflessly patriotic citizen-soldier as political leader has been replaced by various versions of the common man category in the meantime, the private lives of American presidents are still considered of immense importance in American political culture. Due to the fact that their private lives are expected to provide essential information regarding their capability to run the country, the American public takes for granted that the private sphere of political leaders is of public—i.e., media—interest. Against this background, it is not surprising that American politicians, presidents in particular, and their PR advisors have long taken over crafting the image of their private lives as it is presented to the public. In fact, such constructions can impact the success or failure of a political campaign. As argued above, this image of George Washington as the American Cincinnatus was not only indirectly evoked but also explicitly expressed in art. This is the most important way of broadcasting ideas, because it is easily available for everybody. The statue created by JeanAntoine Houdon, the most famous sculptor in Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century, is the most evocative representation of George Washington as American Cincinnatus. A great number of especially French, English, and Italian sculptors were interested in manufacturing George Washington, who was by then an international celebrity. Through Thomas Jefferson’s recommendation in 1785, Jean-Antoine Houdon had been commissioned to create a marble statue of Washington for the rotunda of the new Virginia State Capitol in Richmond (Craven 1968, 166). There is common agreement that Houdon was gifted in achieving simplicity without becoming boring. This claim to commonness is also fulfilled in the statue of George Washington by depicting him as Cincinnatus. This is important for the motif because modesty (i.e., the relinquishing of power after the patriotic duty was done) and the simplicity of Cincinnatus—and hence of Washington—was regarded as part of the ideal virtue which both men embodied. Depicting Washington as a simple citizen is already expressed in the size of the statue. The challenge was to lift him to his proper level without elevating him above the people he represented, which is why the decision to make a lifesized statue was one of the first reached. This sculpture is the only statue Washington ever 235

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posed for: When Houdon traveled to America, taking three assistants with him, he took measurements of Washington, modeled from his cast, and made himself familiar with Washington’s every physical aspect. When Houdon returned to Paris to work on the statue, he considered Washington’s opinion as well as contemporary tastes, and hence decided to dress Washington not in a toga but in his Revolutionary War uniform. Furthermore, they agreed not to depict him in a classical pose. So Houdon decided to create a Cincinnatus based on the common use of the motif (Wills 1984, 435–440; Fitz 2010, 101–110). The statue shows Washington leaning on a column with his left arm and holding a cane in his right hand, showing the complex story of the retiring Cincinnatus in one frozen pose. Houdon catches the transformation from soldier to planter, from commander-in-chief of the Continental Army to “farmer”—in other words, from public figure to a private man. Thus, the selection of the paraphernalia surrounding Washington is also from both his civilian and military lives. He wears his uniform, which is an indicator of his service as commander-inchief; however, he has already taken off his riding cloak and sword, which hang on the column. The cane George Washington is holding in his right hand is a reference to civilian life as a farmer because during that period, gentlemen farmers customarily carried them. It seems like he has just left the war, is on his way home, and is just taking a break to look after his farm. Symbolically, he is also just leaving behind his public duties by laying down the emblems of authoritative, civic power like the sword and parts of his uniform to return to his private life. However, if need be, so the statue suggests, Washington would be ready to use the sword again for the public good. The most obvious reference to Cincinnatus is the plow behind Washington, which suggests that cultivating the fields and returning to civilian life after doing one’s duty for the country is the foundation of a republican democracy, so that it is able to endure. This emphasizes the American conviction that the state and national stability are dependent upon the political authority of independent men of prosperity, whose wealth was rooted in the land (Bjelajac 2000, 145). The plow also helps Washington’s statue embody America’s agricultural self-sufficiency and the agrarian ideal, which Washington saw as a crucial element of America’s economic and political independence from Great Britain. This pose of agrarian simplicity and sense of duty for the public good in the spirit of Cincinnatus was already articulated by Washington in his first inaugural address—the earliest and original official presidential statement on his motivation to accept the highest public office in the nation: I was summoned by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with an immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years […]. On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. (Washington 2009, 2) With regard to the Cincinnatus theme, it is of great importance that Washington was called by his fellow countrymen to be the first president of the United States—i.e., that he did not actively pursue the opportunity to satisfy his political ambitions. In this context it is also crucial to note that Washington, as he lets his listeners know, had already retreated to the private 236

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realm in order to spend his remaining years as a private man in Mount Vernon; then came the call that made him sacrifice this private idyll for the patriotic duty of guiding the country in the newly established office of the presidency. This gesture of modesty, which can frequently be observed among the Founding Fathers, especially George Washington and John Adams, implies a man living a virtuous life in the private domain, disinterested in pursuing a public office, yet always ready to take over public responsibility if need be. In his study on Washington, Barry Schwartz has aptly summarized the reasons that generated the high moral expectations in the political leaders in the Early American Republic: The Americans’ concept of power […] cannot be disassociated from their concept of virtue. Americans never tired of celebrating the merits of justice, temperance, courage, honesty, sincerity, modesty, integrity, calmness, benevolence, sobriety, piety, and rationality. Although these were the classically valued virtues, the function Americans assigned to them was historically unique. Early Americans politicized the traditional Roman and Christian virtues, by defining them as the counterweight to man’s lust for power. […] Virtue does not speak for itself; to be known, it must be formulated in vivid, heroic images. And not any image will do—only one conceived in a recognizable way. […] From the Old Testament derived the notion of Washington as “American Moses”; from the classics derived the image of Washington as Pater Patriae (Father of his Country) and “Cincinnatus.” (Schwartz 1987, 114–116) Various famous examples in the visual record of American collective memory capture this sense of moral leadership that was expected to come with political leadership. Two of the best-known examples are Edward Savage’s The Washington Family (1789–1796), exhibited in the National Gallery on Washington Mall, and John Trumbull’s The Resignation of General Washington (1822–1824), displayed in the Rotunda of the Capitol.6 Such paintings have strongly contributed to idealize, commemorate, preserve, and perpetuate the expectations early American republican citizens had about the American president and the First Family. Such expectations of the American public in the moral integrity of its political leaders as well as the reflection of these leaders’ virtues in their private lives still have an enormously high currency in American political culture. To this day, these expectations seem to be largely absent in European political culture. Furthermore, the fact that these public expectations in the moral integrity came into crisis as a result of Watergate, the Vietnam War, and, arguably, also “Monicagate,” has not lowered the necessity of presidential candidates to display high moral standards. Quite to the contrary, in order to eliminate the potential for further Watergates (and other political crises attributed with the suffix “…gate”), candidates are expected to reveal more about their private lives and to stage privacy even more explicitly. Such performances become a necessity, so that candidates do not offer their political opponent any potential weaknesses that could be attacked in a campaign. In his autobiography Why not the Best, published very timely at the beginning of his presidential election campaign, Jimmy Carter, for instance, formulated these high moral claims as follows: It is time for us to reaffirm and to strengthen our ethical and spiritual and political beliefs. There must be no lowering of these standards, no acceptance of mediocrity in any aspect of our private or public lives. It is obvious that the best way for our 237

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leaders to restore their credibility is to be credible, and in order for us to be trusted we must be trustworthy! (Carter 1975, 154) By explicitly stressing the importance of the ethically immaculate private sphere in American political culture for the public realm—and thus for the public office—Carter not only recognizes the political value of privacy but also explicitly demands from voters to openly examine a politician’s credibility and trustworthiness based on their private life. Thus, Carter’s open call to cherish family—much like Ronald Reagan’s public demand to pray during his two-term presidency in a country constitutionally based on the separation of church and state—contributed to the blurring of the boundaries between private and public moral values. The family, since the American Revolution imagined as the sector where moral values and virtues are taught, as expressed in the concept of Republican Motherhood (Kerber 1980), can thus be considered a window into a morally intact world that reflects public virtue as well.

The president “in private” Concepts such as the American Cincinnatus are no longer available. These days, in order to identify with the president, the candidate needs to be perceived as “one of us,” as a common (wo)man—as “the average Joe” or “plain Jane.” On a rhetorical level, this authentication of the politician is often undertaken at the national convention or in campaign rallies, for example, by those who have known them their whole lives, very often family members or childhood friends—at any rate, somebody who knows the candidate primarily or even exclusively as a private person. On the visual level, a certain number of images reserved for the pictorial record have a similarly humanizing function when constructing or familiarizing the candidate as “one of us.” Within this kind of logic, the private life of a presidential candidate then also becomes a yardstick for the integrity of the person: Thus, the family or individual family members rather than political fellow travelers are not only taken as moral authorities to testify to the integrity of the candidate per se. More than that, they are often used as “authentic” sources to validate the truthfulness of the larger political program, as the family life can be perceived as a credible and microcosmical reflection of this agenda. Ever since the late 1970s, “family values” have been on top of the programmatic agenda of presidential candidates (Stone 1994, 68–69).7 There is no exact equivalent to the American concept of family values in different European cultures, but the concept refers to a philosophical-political-social-moral worldview in the sense of the German term Weltanschauung, which represents basic convictions and core values (Weiss 2008, 42; Miedzian 2008) and can be considered a model of life in the sense of a Lebensentwurf. In fact, there does not even seem to be agreement any longer on what family values are in the respective platforms of the Republican and Democratic parties. Suffice it to say here that social and religious conservatives commonly—and the media mostly—refer to traditional morality or Christian values when using this term. These basic convictions and core values are based in the family as a (conservative) institution, including clear positions on often contentious topics like the role of men and women in society, abortion, or same-sex-marriage. To evoke the impression that “he is one of us” is of central importance. To stop at a diner on a campaign tour for breakfast or dinner, introducing oneself with a casual “Hi, my name is Barack” (or Bill, or George) belongs to this category as well. Similarly effective is the spouse’s attendance at the children’s or grandchildren’s sporting events and eating hamburgers or hotdogs at a public stand. The latter activity suggests that the candidate does not prefer 238

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haute cuisine: rather, it implies that “we are average Americans—like you.” The “average Joe” or “plain Jane” is someone voters can identify with.8 Barbara Bush was an excellent example for many of these functions when she stressed at the National Republican Convention in 1992, for instance, the long and strenuous days her husband, George Bush the elder, would spend ever so often in the dusty fields of Texas (quoted in Weiss 2008, 105). It has to be noted in this context that the Bushs in the 1990s were not cattle farmers in Texas but millionaires in the oil business and counted among the richest families in the country. In the same campaign, Barbara Bush said: So before I introduce you to my family, please think a moment about your own families: about your dreams for your children; about your concerns for your parents; about your hopes for the future. Well, because I know him better than anyone else, I’m here to tell you: George Bush knows because we have the same dreams for our children and grandchildren. (quoted in Weiss 2008, 106) The message evoked here is essentially the following: “I, Barbara Bush, married to this ‘average Joe’ for more than 45 years, can verify that he is like you, that he cares deeply, and that he knows your concerns and sorrows.” Similarly, Tipper Gore, in the 2000 presidential campaign, emphasized this “average Joe” theme by stressing that her husband, Democratic candidate Al Gore, visited every single one of his son’s football games in spite of the immense stress on the campaign trail: “Every one of them! I don’t really want to share that with everybody—it’s personal. But it matters that you know about this person’s character. It matters that he puts his family first. He will put your family first!” (quoted in Weiss 2008106). By sharing this “personal” insight, the candidate Al Gore, always considered intellectually aloof, rather stiff, “humorless and pedantic” (Seifert 2012, 178), and merely a career politician,9 is presented by his wife as an everyman who not only “knows,” but “will put your family first”—much like Barbara Bush suggested about her husband eight years earlier. In other words, he will treat the nation like his own family. Another instance of staging the “private” life of the Gores in order to make Al Gore appear more human was the somewhat clumsy and awkward kiss at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in 2000. Though this attempt thoroughly backfired by rather confirming than disproving Gore’s stiffness and “robotic image” (James 2000), it does, after all, approve the need to perform a sense of privacy in the public sphere. The reason for going awry is not that “the kiss”10 happened, but how it was done or performed, which testifies to the importance of another aspect: the performed act must be credible in order to be perceived as authentic.11 Altogether it is more likely that the voter perceives the voice of a family member as a less staged and more authentic source regarding the “real” values of a candidate than other sources, because these family members have known the person long before they became a politician. In the wake of such acts of authentication, it is noteworthy to acknowledge that some of the (prospective) First Ladies have presented themselves as much more traditional, if not conservative, with regard to their ideas of family values than they really are.12

The First Family Against this background of the family as an “authentic” mirror of a candidate’s values and agendas, images of the family and, where available, especially of the candidate’s children, 239

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serve the important purpose of portraying the political leader “in private.” Although this kind of visual narrative, as many others, goes back to the portrayal of the private life of George Washington as particularly evidenced in Edward Savage’s eighteenth-century painting The Washington Family, it goes without saying that the practice of extensively portraying the president with his children was introduced during the Kennedy presidency. Of course, such an initiative requires a candidate young enough to still have small children living with him, which automatically excludes the vast majority of office holders. The fact that the tenure of the Kennedys in the White House, following the extremely conservative 1950s under Dwight D. Eisenhower, which also included the sad years of the communist witch hunt under Senator Joseph McCarthy, seemed to call for an age of change that coincided with television taking over a large part of the visual presidential narrative and thus opened the door into the private life of the First Family. As Christine Weiss points out, after the Kennedy years the role of the family in electoral campaigns changed for good, and it became not just an option but also a necessity to deliver details about the candidate’s family life (Weiss 2008, 23). With the exception of the Obama era, at no point in history would the family life of a president or a presidential candidate be so much at the center of attention. At a time when the job of the White House photographer was not yet as institutionalized as it is today,13 it was photojournalist Alan Stanley Tretick’s work for Look magazine, in particular, that brought the images of a young, happy, and harmonious family home to millions of Americans. As Louis Liebovich puts it, “[t]hey seemed to be the perfect family, the husband and wife everyone in the country wanted to be” (Liebovich 2001, 24). One of the most widely circulated of these Tretick images is the photograph of the president at work at his desk in the Oval Office with John, Jr., hiding inside the desk. As curator Philip Brookman of the Corcoran Gallery of Art has put it, Tretick’s photographs of the Kennedys, “published in Look from 1961 to 1964, helped define the American family of the early sixties and lent Kennedy an endearing credibility that greatly contributed to his popularity.” It has become common knowledge that the Kennedys’ marriage was anything but perfect. However, this does not diminish the values the American (and, in fact, global) public projected on to the private lives of the Kennedys as First Family. Not only had the children now become part of the political narrative of the office holder, the newly established visual repertoire was also supposed to stay. As Pete Souza’s photograph of Sasha Obama hiding in the Oval Office shows, the Kennedy formula still works today.14 In fact, even though the publicly displayed, happy, and harmonious family life of the Obamas seemed to be quite credible and authentic, this glimpse into the private life of the candidate was nevertheless strategically crafted as a promotional asset ever since Pete Souza took over the “making” of the visual Obama narrative.15 The image of Barack Obama as a caring and loving husband and father had thus already been well established before the first African American First Family would enter the White House. As is displayed by the comparison of the two photographs of children playing in the Oval Office, due to taking the Kennedys as a model, the script had already existed and only needed to be adapted. Where the Kennedy children Caroline and John, Jr., had their pony Macaroni, the Obamas, just another average American family according to the public story, had their dog Bo. Such gestures, indicative of the average American family, abounded with the Obamas, and glimpses into their private lives seemed to confirm the public’s desire to see the First Family as “one of us.” For instance, already on June 16, 2008, the magazine Us Weekly introduced Michelle Obama, wife of then Senator and presidential candidate 240

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Barack Obama, as their cover story. With the couple hugging each other and obviously deeply in love, the headline reads “Michelle Obama: Why Barack Loves Her,” only to explain in the subtitle how average they “really” are: “She shops at Target, loved Sex and the City and never misses the girls’ recitals. The untold romance between a down-toearth mom and the man who calls her ‘my rock.’” The down-to-earthness that is stressed here as the couple’s main attribute and with which a larger public can easily identify, was stressed again a few months later in the same magazine, after the Obamas had actually moved into the White House. The February 9, 2009 issue came with the cover page titled “Secrets of a White House Mom,” firmly rooting the formerly high profile lawyer, who made almost twice as much money with the law firm Sidley Austin as her husband did as senator, in the domestic realm. Once again, the subtitle makes clear that Michelle Obama is just a common woman: “Michelle Obama’s keeping it real: Pottery Barn decor, no nanny, J. Crew fashion, romantic dinners. Inside the First Lady’s private world.” Michelle Obama is certainly anything but an average woman, yet it is important for the larger national public to be perceived as such.

From farmer to cowboy: The American president as common man When it comes to evoking the image of the common man and a sense of connectedness with ordinary Americans, the following links can be drawn: What the image of the yeoman farmer did for George Washington and the Early Republic, and the image of the frontiersman achieved in the mid-nineteenth century (especially for Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln), the cowboy image certainly managed to accomplish in the twentieth century. As an exhibit on “Cowboys and Presidents” at the Autry National Center has shown, many presidents and presidential candidates have employed the cowboy image, most prominently Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. However, no one has used the cowboy image more effectively than President Reagan (see Figures 20.1 and 20.2). First of all, as an actor, Reagan was best remembered for his cowboy roles before he would enter politics despite the fact that he only starred as the iconic cowboy figure in less than ten B-westerns and TV-series episodes. As governor of California (1967–1975), he manifested this cowboy image as promoter of small government, maximum individual freedom, welfare cuts, harsh treatment of the student protesters in Berkeley, a staunch pro-life stance, and capital punishment. When he and his wife Nancy bought the Rancho Del Cielo near Santa Barbara in 1974, it was already decided that Reagan would not run for a third term as California governor. Rather, much like George Washington, who retreated into his private life as a simple gentleman farmer at Mount Vernon after his career as commander-in-chief during the American Revolution, Reagan retreated to his farm. However, the latter did so in order to prepare the next step of his political career: to run for president. During his two terms as president, Reagan would offer many iconic cowboy images (e.g. on horseback, like Pete Souza’s shot of the president on his favourite steed; Figure 20.1); however, the most widely circulated “private” image of Reagan, Michael Evans’ photograph depicting him wearing his cowboy hat (Figure 20.2), originates from his time of political interlude between retiring as California governor and being elected president of the United States. It also served as cover of Time magazine’s “Commemorative Issue” of June 14, 2004, published after Reagan’s death on June 5, 2004, implying that this is how future generations are supposed to remember this icon of conservative politics. 241

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Figure 20.1 (left) President Reagan riding his horse “El Alamein” at Rancho Del Cielo, California, on 8 April 1985 Photo: Pete Souza. Figure 20.2 (right) President Reagan in cowboy hat at Rancho Del Cielo in 1976 Photo: Michael A.W. Evans.

Sexual integrity as moral integrity An entirely different aspect of the media focus on the private lives of presidents or presidential candidates, which emerges as a direct consequence of the public’s desire to imagine the First Family as the representative American family, is to equate sexual integrity with the candidate’s moral integrity. This kind of projection of the moral model-function includes the most intimate relations between the president and his wife, which cannot be found in a similar way in other Western democracies. Absolute faithfulness is expected from politicians running for public office, and the higher the office, it seems, the higher the expectations. As The New York Times put it succinctly in July 1980 in the context of denouncing Ted Kennedy’s earlier affairs: A candidate’s sex life, in particular, is regarded not as a source of prurient interest but as a crucial indicator of his attitudes toward issues affecting women and families. If he neglects his wife, if he has affairs with other women […] his behavior is considered not a private but a public concern (quoted in Weiss 2008, 90)

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That having an affair is considered a matter of public concern for political leaders, especially presidents, can be observed in several case studies, the most prominent of which are Bill and Hillary Clinton. It has been theorized that after Watergate even higher morality standards were applied to American presidents, which is also evidenced in the fact that, in the early 1960s, John F. Kennedy still got away with his unfaithfulness towards his wife Jackie. However, already a few years later (still before Watergate and the Vietnam War), in 1964, the favored Republican candidate for the presidential nomination, Nelson Rockefeller, was discredited because of an extramarital affair, as was Ted Kennedy in the 1970s and 1980s.16 A more severe example can be found in Gary Hart, who served as a Democratic senator representing Colorado (1975–1987) and ran in the Democratic primaries in 1984 and again in 1988. He was considered the most prospective frontrunner for the Democratic nomination until various news organizations reported that he had once had an extramarital affair. He practically dropped out of higher politics entirely after the disclosure of his unfaithfulness. Interestingly, the revelation of his affair came at a point when he had just been quoted in several newspapers that there is nothing interesting to be found in his private life. He withdrew his nomination after losing 15% in his support rate just before the important primary in New Hampshire (Weiss 2008, 100). No doubt, the most prominent case in this context is the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. It emerged in 1998 from a sexual relationship between President Bill Clinton and the 22-yearold White House intern Monica Lewinsky. News coverage of this extramarital affair and the resulting investigation eventually led to the impeachment of President Clinton in 1998 by the House of Representatives and his subsequent acquittal on all impeachment charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in a 21-day Senate trial. Clearly, the media footage and the oppositional Republicans put “Monicagate” almost on the same level as Watergate, as the name indicates. However, the president’s job approval ratings remained stable on a rather high level, since the voters were generally satisfied with Clinton as a president. It is fair to assume, first of all, that it makes a big difference whether someone is running for the presidency or is already in office (see the “fall” of Gary Hart [Bai 2014]). Secondly, and equally important, commentators agree that Bill and Hillary Clinton teamed up for an extraordinarily successful image and scandal management. Thirdly, Clinton was and still is an extremely charismatic personality who knows how to handle the public. What might additionally have played a role for Clinton to get away with unfaithfulness at that particular point in time could be that, by the 1990s, the divorce rate in the United States was alarmingly high (at 50%). Divorce was frequently called “the plague” of the 1990s, and the fact that Hillary Clinton stood by her husband and her forgiveness might have been seen as a sign to counter that larger trend. As the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal also shows, in these cases of unfaithfulness in office, the First Lady can serve as a surrogate model for the public virtue of the president. More generally, however, the public frowns upon a barely working marriage in the White House; instead, they expect an ideally romantic one. In this context, the Obamas, for instance, certainly scored very high which is, once again, documented in many of Pete Souza’s photographs.

A view from abroad: The Americanization of the private sphere in European politics In his seminal study on the changing nature of public culture and urban society in the modern world, The Fall of Public Man, Richard Sennett has written about the significance of the private life in the realm of politics: 243

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Suicide in modern politics lies in insisting that “you need to know nothing about my private life; all you need to know is what I believe and the programs I’ll enact.” To avoid suicide, one must surmount the disability to have a purely political will. (Sennett 1992, 270) Knowing about a political candidate’s private life is arguably even more crucial in the age of social media and the digital revolution. However, this desire to invade a public person’s privacy is by no means merely a sign of modernity. As I have shown above, the tendency to establish an important interconnection between the private and public lives of political leaders has a rather long tradition in the United States. In fact, the tradition is as old as the nation itself; it goes back at least to the American Revolution and is certainly not a trend emerging only with the arrival of the media age. With the abundance of American trends and fashions traveling abroad in the age of globalization, the question arises how this tendency towards privatizing the public sphere has influenced European political culture. Christina Holtz-Bacha argued almost two decades ago that the more recent focus on the private sphere in politics is just another sign of the Americanization of the European political and media landscape. As Holtz-Bacha pointed out: While, according to the Anglo-American understanding of the freedom of press, any regulation of the press, even where generally considered legitimate, is denied and the protection of individual privacy is subordinated to the need to inform the public, in Germany (and other European countries) the right to privacy is given priority over the right of the public to be informed. (Holtz-Bacha 2001, 21; my translation) In Germany, a particular protection is additionally guaranteed in the realm of the intimate private sphere. Holtz-Bacha mentions four main aspects that have assumed the function of putting the private life of politicians more center stage since the chancellorship of Gerhard Schroeder (1998–2005), who was first to openly stage his private life for political profit. These aspects, broadly speaking, serve a humanizing, a simplifying, and an emotionalizing function, and they contribute to a kind of brand awareness connected to the candidate (Holtz-Bacha 2001, 23–24). In other words, the long-time standstill agreement between the German press and the political leadership continues to be abrogated since the late 1990s. However, the level of attention paid to political leaders’ private lives is certainly highly diversified in different European countries: To this day, it is high in France, moderate in Germany, and almost non-existent in Russia. In 2014, the French media, for instance, were eager to report about President François Hollande’s separation from his partner, journalist Valérie Trierweiler, and his new relationship with actress Julie Gayet.17 German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s four marriages (and three divorces) were not targets of extensive media coverage, and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s divorce from his wife Ljudmilla after 30 years of marriage went almost uncommented upon by the state-run media. His new relationship has neither been made official nor covered by the media.18 However, even though public interest in the private lives of the political establishment in France might be significantly higher than elsewhere in Europe, a connection between the private life and the political and moral values as practiced in the United States cannot be asserted for either Germany or France, as evidenced by many examples.19 244

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The European politician who has most obviously and very consciously cast himself in the fashion of American political culture was certainly former French President Nicolas Sarkozy. More concretely, there is no denying—as frequent comparisons by journalists have shown (Lechevallier 2006; Louis 2013; Meiler 2012)—that already early in his political career Sarkozy, as Secretary of the Interior, tried to copy John F. Kennedy’s style. Sarkozy, who “likes to think of himself as a great connoisseur of the media […] and well skilled at handling reporters assigned to follow his trail” (Lechevallier 2006), has remained faithful to this strategy ever since. Most famously, Sarkozy’s portrait in the Paris Match edition of May 23, 2002 leaves no doubt as to whom the French president was mimicking (Figure 20.3): The image reveals obvious parallels between a photograph of John F. Kennedy and his son, John-John, published in Look magazine in October 1963, and the French magazine’s portrayal of an up-and-coming politician 40 years later. The caption in the French magazine even explicitly emphasises that the photo is a replica of the famous Kennedy picture (Paris Match 2002).20 Sarkozy’s self-promotional strategy of imitating Kennedy seems to have come full circle through the marriage to his third wife, Carla Bruni, in February 2008. The cover page of Vanity Fair of September of that same year, featuring a photograph of Bruni shot by Annie Leibovitz, assumes this connection by headlining the title story with the question: “Carla Bruni: The New Jackie O.?” In a similar act of appropriating someone else’s iconic image, the presidential candidate Sarkozy, on the back of a white horse in the Camargue region during his first presidential campaign in the spring of 2007 (Figure 20.4), bears a strong resemblance to Ronald Reagan’s iconic image on his white steed on his ranch in California (see Figure 20.1).

Figure 20.3 (left) Nicolas Sarkozy as French Secretary of the Interior and “political celebrity du jour” (Lechevallier 2006) in May 2002 in a cover story of the French weekly magazine Paris Match (with his second wife Cecelia and their son Louis) Photo: Jacques Lange, Getty Images. Figure 20.4 (right) Sarkozy in the spring of 2007, when he was presidential candidate for the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), as he visits a ranch in the Camargue region on the last day of campaigning Photo: Christophe Ena, AP.

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Emmanuel Macron’s most recent political success in France as the newly elected French president was also immediately connected to the popularity and iconicity of two American presidents: John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama. In a contribution to the new social media platform Ze.tt, recently launched by the German national weekly Die Zeit, Nora Jacobs compares the personalities, the radiance, the willingness to promote change, the brilliance as speakers, and the social media campaigns of Macron and Obama. Most strikingly, the visual aesthetics of depicting Macron as a savior figure21 strongly resemble Obama’s depiction as savior, Jesus figure, or angel, often with a halo or halo-like illumination that has frequently been dismissed as mere coincidence (Scarry 2015) during his first presidential campaign and the beginning of his first administration. While this motif, as many other of the iconic Obama images, goes back to the work of Pete Souza,22 a sheer flood of images of Obama with this theme has emerged ever since. One of the much-discussed images of this kind was produced by EPA photographer Michael Reynolds (Figure 20.6). While on the textual level the label “savior” is transferred from Obama to Macron, on the visual level a number of photographs of President Macron feature a halo that emerges in the form of one of the stars on the EU-flag (Figure 20.5), indicating the values of unity,

Figure 20.5 (left) President Macron with one of the stars of the EU flag in the background. The image was originally published with the following caption: “At any rate, the halo is properly in place” (Högele 2017) Photo: Ludovic Marin (AFP). Figure 20.6 (right) President Obama during a press conference in the White House, 11 March 2011 Photo: Michael Reynolds (EPA).

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solidarity, and harmony between the nations of the European Union. Thus, Macron surfaces as much as savior of the European Union as did Obama as the great unifier aiming to bridge the deep gap between democrats and republicans, liberals and conservatives, at his surprise victory in 2008. Even though there is much less evidence that Emmanuel Macron has consciously used John F. Kennedy as model to orchestrate his own career as there is, for instance, in the case of Nicholas Sarkozy, the parallels drawn by the international press are strikingly visible. French (Geais 2016), Spanish (Valderrama 2016), and German (Böhmer 2017; Handelsblatt 2017; Killy 2017; Link 2010) newspapers and magazines repeatedly draw this analogy, comparing the French president with the “golden boy” Kennedy and the Macrons as a political and private “team” with Jack and Jackie (Böhmer 2017), or relating the reform program of Macron to Kennedy’s “New Frontier”-campaign and likening the charm, intellect, charisma, mundane life style, and “picturesque boyishness” (my translation) of the French newcomer to the young JFK (Böhmer 2017). While many of these deliberations seem exaggerated, one of the leading German business newspapers, the Handelsblatt, makes a convincing observation about Macron’s appeal to his fellow citizens to “ask themselves every single morning what they can do for their country” (my translation). This plea bears a striking resemblance to John F. Kennedy’s iconic inaugural speech: “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” It is likely that this phrase was borrowed, and not a mere coincidence. In the German context, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, member of the Christian Social Union (CSU), emerges as a significant case of consciously crafting his career in the image of John F. Kennedy and simultaneously—and very deliberately—including the private realm in this construction. Between 2009 and 2011, zu Guttenberg, in many ways a model career politician, was persistently polled the most popular German politician. A member of the German Bundestag since 2002, he moved from Secretary General of the CSU (2008–2009) to Secretary of Trade (2009) and, finally, to Secretary of Defense (2009–2011) in a quick succession of promotions. As such, and until his fall from grace in March of 2011 due to the revelation by the media that he had plagiarized his dissertation,23 he was hailed the most prospective conservative candidate to succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor. As the popular journalist and author Hajo Schumacher has pointed out in a contribution to the German daily newspaper Die Welt titled “Unsere Guttenbergs, die fränkischen Kennedys” (“Our Guttenbergs, the Frankonian Kennedys”), for a while Karl-Theodor and Stephanie zu Guttenberg took over the role of surrogate monarchs in the German public perception. As the new “dream couple” (Schumacher 2010; Wagner 2011) or “glamor couple” (Ridderbusch 2011), molded in the image of John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie some 50 years earlier (Figure 20.7), the zu Guttenbergs “appealed to the perfect-world nostalgia of an estimated 80% of the German population” (Schumacher 2010; my translation). Katja Ridderbusch has termed this very phenomenon accompanying the zu Guttenbergs the “Kennedy-factor.” To cater to these desires, it might have helped that Stephanie zu Guttenberg is a great-greatgranddaughter of Otto von Bismarck, founder of the German nation-state. It is important to note the symbiotic relationship at work here between an image-prone media industry creating and simultaneously hunting such Kennedy-like images, on the one hand, and the zu Guttenbergs only all too willingly providing such images on the other. With a keen sense for the importance of the image in contemporary political 247

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Figure 20.7 Karl-Theodor and Stephanie zu Guttenberg during a reception (Schumacher) Photo: Frank Hoermann (SVEN SIMON Photoagentur).

culture, according to Schumacher, “almost every single photo of the [then] Secretary of the Defense is a work of art representing the modern aesthetics of political power” (Schumacher 2010, my translation). This comparison to Kennedy goes so far that American politicians have drawn the same analogies. For instance, William Delahunt, a former U.S. Representative for Massachusetts and member of the Democratic Party, who worked with Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, stated in a 2011 interview with the Deutschlandfunk, a German public broadcasting radio station, distributing national

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news and current affairs similar to NPR: “[Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg] has a wonderful wife and a successful career. He possesses many of the qualities that people attributed to Kennedy. I am sure that Secretary zu Guttenberg will have a great political future in Germany” (quoted in Ridderbusch 2011). Stephanie accompanied Karl-Theodor to many official appointments, semi-official events (like the Oktoberfest in Munich or the Bayreuth Festival [“Bayreuther Festspiele”] in honor of the nineteenth-century German composer Richard Wagner), and TV shows. The couple was always extensively covered by the media images depicting them with their two daughters, staging them as the perfect modern family everyone wanted to emulate. Very much in the tradition of John and Jackie Kennedy with John-John and Caroline or, for that matter, more recently, Barack and Michelle Obama with Sasha and Malia, the zu Guttenbergs were projected as a model family in otherwise rather confusing and disorienting times.

Conclusion As I have shown, the practice of “storying” and staging a narrative to establish an important interconnection between the private and the public lives of political leaders, especially of presidential candidates and their families, has a long tradition in the United States. In spite of the fact that “new media and new modes of storytelling make possible new ways of imagining” (Smith 2009, 280), the core elements implemented in more than 200 years of the American presidential story seem to be quite stable. Neither has the “power of the story” as such been diminished, nor have, by and large, decisively new plot elements or innovative stock characters been created. Consequently, new media or new modes of telling the narrative are not required to change the plot structure or to modify the repertoire of available characters. Rather, it seems that the principal ingredients of scripts needed to draft the presidential narrative have stayed pretty much the same. To this day, the private life of American political leaders has been used as a mirror reflecting core political values and ideologies. At the same time, the French and German examples sketched out above show that American political culture continues to travel across the Atlantic and influences the political culture in the “Old World” as part of an Americanization of the European media landscape, as Holtz-Bacha suggests. Theorizations of the process of Americanization, such as those suggested by Winfried Fluck, repeatedly reminding us that “cultural material is never simply absorbed as a model of behavior but is reappropriated in different contexts for different needs and purposes” (Fluck 2004, 21). As such, the Americanization of European political culture, as Americanization per se, is not a one-way street. To be more precise, it is doubtful whether the values connected to such traveling images transporting political culture and, especially, the significance of the private sphere as part of that very political culture, have journeyed along with these images. What remains clear is that French and German political cultures are based on their own sets of historically grown and politically rooted values. Insofar, European politicians must continue to craft their individual images carefully in order not to be accused of political mimicry or even simulation, i.e., of imitation just symbolically employed without a genuine connection to the political or individual European context, running the risk of both blurring the political message and undermining the agenda of authenticity.

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Notes 1 On a more anecdotal note, when I stayed in the United States for a year during the Gerhard Schroeder administration, I was frequently asked how Germans, an otherwise rather rational people, could possibly vote for someone who was divorced three times and was in his fourth marriage back then. 2 For instance, when Howard Dean ran for president in the Democratic nomination campaign of 2004, his wife announced that she would continue in her profession rather than touring in his campaign. This caused a major public uproar and setback for Dean’s candidacy, because this was not considered proper behavior for a prospective First Family. 3 These aspects alone, however, would not adequately explain the high degree of inquiry into the president’s private life. Suffice it to say here that several of these systemic aspects hold true for some Latin American countries as well, yet the presidents’ private lives play no significant role at all in these cases. 4 The function of the head of state as model of morality was first discussed by the English philosopher Lord Bolingbroke (1678–1751) in his work Idea of a Patriot King from 1738. Much lesser known as an important influence on the American Revolution than the philosophical works by John Locke and Charles de Montesquieu, Lord Bolingbroke saw the enlightened and impartial leader of the people, who guides through example in virtuousness and paternal authority, as an ideal (Weiss 2008, 93). 5 On the level of the average American during the American Revolution, the Cincinnatus-image could best be connected to the generic figure of the American yeoman farmer as Minuteman (Fitz 2010, 75–110). 6 Constantino Brumidi’s fresco The Apotheosis of Washington (1865), which is visible through the oculus of the dome in the rotunda of the United States Capitol Building, is the ultimate symbol of Washington’s moral impeccability. 7 This had its climax in the Republican counter-program to the first presidential campaign of Bill Clinton in 1992, never to vanish as a core political issue ever since. 8 Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, better known by his nickname “Joe the Plumber,” gained national attention as model “average Joe” during the 2008 US presidential election campaign. During a videotaped campaign stop in Ohio by Senator and then-Democratic nominee Barack Obama, Wurzelbacher asked the senator about the tax policy regarding his small plumbing business. Obama’s response included the following statement: “When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” Obama’s response was attacked by the conservative media as well as by his rival, Republican nominee Senator John McCain, as an indication that Obama was primarily interested in the redistribution of wealth and, thus, had a socialist agenda. Since he expressed to Senator Obama that he was interested in purchasing a small plumbing business, Wurzelbacher was given the moniker “Joe the Plumber” by the McCain-Palin campaign. The campaign subsequently took him to make several appearances in campaign events in Ohio, and McCain often referenced “Joe the Plumber” in campaign speeches and in the final presidential debate as a metaphor for middle-class Americans (Cox 2010, 87–89). 9 As Cornog points out, Gore was also perceived as being born for the presidency: “One reason Al Gore was such an unsympathetic character is that his life held so little drama—he was elected to the House at age 28, to Senate at 36, and to the vice presidency at 44. The very fact that he seemed to be (and to feel himself to be) destined for the White House is probably one of the major reasons he did not make it” (Cornog 2004, 26). 10 Public opinion consultant Erica Seifert has commented on “the kiss” as follows: The character of Al Gore as wooden was so widespread, and the campaign’s attempt to dispel that image so well known, that when the candidate and his wife enjoyed a long and passionate kiss at the convention, the ensuing media frenzy focused only on its authenticity—they cared less about the kiss than whether it was scripted. In the days following the convention, the candidate and his campaign operatives made the early show rounds, defending the Gores’ spontaneity […]. Rather than examining the acceptance speech, the poll numbers, or the post-convention campaign trip, the media scrutinized the convention footage and demanded to know whether Gore’s advisors had mandated a timed practice rub with the candidate’s wife. For Gore, who had learned to joke about himself, this provided an opportunity to discuss his family and his image with the likes of some of the country’s most influential opinion-makers: talk show hosts. (Seifert 2012, 178)

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The visual aesthetics of privacy 11 The very fact that Michelle and Barack Obama were frequently portrayed in kissing poses (and other brief moments of intimacy), without being criticized for them, shows that the American public does not disapprove of the act of kissing as such, but rather its lack of credibility and authenticity. 12 In the presidential campaigns of their husbands, successful business women like Hillary Clinton, Tipper Gore, Teresa Heinz Kerry, and Michelle Obama stressed much more their motherly rather than their professional sides. This arguably suggests that feminist movements have bypassed the office of the First Lady. 13 Only with the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson did the access to the Oval Office become almost exclusively limited to the official photographers of the White House Photo Office (Bredar 2010, 14, 85–89). 14 See also the French politicians Nicolas Sarkozy and Emmanuel Macron as well as the German politician Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg in this context. 15 Pete Souza is an American photojournalist and was the Chief Official White House photographer for President Barack Obama as well as Director of the White House Photography Office. He was already a member of the White House Photo Office during President Ronald Reagan’s second term in the 1980s. Before his current occupation, he was a photographer with the Chicago Tribune (Washington bureau) from 1998–2007, during which he also followed the path of Senator Obama to the presidency, which he documented in The Rise of Barack Obama (2008). 16 On Ted Kennedy’s frequent affairs and his potential to run for president, The New York Times asked in July 1980: “A man who has a pattern of brief affairs is a child with an unending, babyish need to puff up his ego with adoration from new women. Is a person like that mature enough to govern the country?” (quoted in Weiss 2008, 99). 17 In January 2014, Hollande officially announced his separation from Trierweiler after the tabloid magazine Closer revealed his affair with actress Julie Gayet. At a press conference Hollande claimed that “private matters should be respectfully treated and remain private” (Süddeutsche Zeitung; my translation). Such a statement seems necessary since, as Anne-Sophie Lechevallier puts it, “this ‘celebritization’ of politicians and intense fascination with the private lives of public figures is commonplace among the French media.” 18 In April 2014, the Kremlin confirmed Vladimir Putin’s divorce. He has two adult daughters with his ex-wife Ljudmilla, who have never been officially introduced to the public. Well-informed circles have spread the news that his eldest daughter has recently had a son, which constitutes Putin as a grandfather. While the private life of the president in Russia is considered taboo, which means that it is not covered by the media at all, at his annual press conference in December 2014 Putin admitted to be romantically involved again, without mentioning his partner’s name. It is most likely though that the new lover is the former Olympic gold medal winner in rhythmic gymnastics and fellow politician Alina Kabajewa (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 2014). 19 Again, former President François Hollande might serve as an example here. For over thirty years, his partner was fellow Socialist politician Ségolène Royal, with whom he has four children. They broke up in 2007, shortly before a French website published details of a relationship between Hollande and Valérie Trierweiler. After Trierweiler confirmed and openly discussed her relationship with Hollande in an interview with the French weekly Télé 7 Jours, she remained a reporter for the magazine Paris Match, but stopped working on political stories. Trierweiler moved into the Élysée Palace with Hollande as First Lady when he became president and started to accompany him on official travel. Neither of the two women, Royal or Trierweiler, has ever been married to François Hollande. 20 The caption to the photograph reads “la famille Sarkozy joue un remake des Kennedy. Comme JohnJohn Kennedy jouait sous le bureau de JFK à la Maison-Blanche, Louis Sarkozy chahute avec le labrador Indi sous celui de Nicolas” (Paris Match 2002, 61). (The Sarkozy family plays or performs a “remake” of the Kennedys. As John-John Kennedy once played under the desk of JFK in the White House, Louis Sarkozy distracts his father Nicolas with the Labrador Indi [my translation].) 21 Accordingly, on June 17, 2017, The Economist released an issue with Emmanuel Macron on the cover walking on water and the title story “Europe’s Saviour.” 22 Already in Souza’s The Rise of Obama there appears a photograph of the then senator with the caption “The senator speaks at a town hall rally in Keene, N.H.” (Souza 2008, 140–141) with a halo-like light around his head.

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Karsten Fitz 23 In March of 2011, zu Guttenberg resigned over the controversy related to his doctoral dissertation. Accusations of his doctoral thesis, “Verfassung und Verfassungsvertrag” (“Constitution and Constitutional Treaty”; University of Bayreuth, 2007), being plagiarized were initially denied by him. When it was found out that zu Guttenberg had used the Bundestag’s research services for the work on his doctoral thesis, he eventually stepped down, shortly after the University of Bayreuth withdrew his doctoral title.

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The visual aesthetics of privacy Killy, Daniel. “So ähnlich sind sich Macron und Kennedy.” HAZ.de, May 29, 2017. Lechevallier, Anne-Sophie. “French Roast, Served Up American Style.” Global Journalist 1 January 2006. Liebovich, Louis. The Press and the Modern Presidency: Myths and Mindsets from Kennedy to Election 2000. Rev. 2nd ed. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001. Link, Albert. “Italienisches Promi-Magazin schreibt: Die Guttenbergs sind die deutschen Kennedys.” Bild. de, December 21, 2010. Louis, Jean-Philippe. “Ce jour-là…: Nicolas Sarkozy a voulu copier John F. Kennedy.” Vanity Fair France, June 26, 2013. Meiler, Oliver. “Er träumte davon, der Kennedy Frankreichs zu sein.” Tagesanzeiger April 19, 2012. Miedzian, Myriam. “Family Values: American and French Style.” The Huffington Post May 21, 2008. Novak, Michael. Choosing Presidents: Symbols of Political Leadership. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1992. Paris Match. 23 May 2002 (no. 2765): 61. Ridderbusch, Katja. “Zu Guttenbergs Kennedy-Faktor.” Deutschlandfunk February 3, 2011. Scarry, Eddie. “Associated Press Explains Obama ‘Halo’ Photos.” Washingtonexaminer.com, June 26, 2015. Schlesinger, Arthur M. The Imperial Presidency. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004[1973]. Schroeder, Alan. Celebrity-in-Chief: How Show Business Took Over the White House. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004. Schumacher, Hajo. “Unsere Guttenbergs, die fränkischen Kennedys.” Welt.de, October 11, 2010. Schwartz, Barry. George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol. New York: Free Press, 1987. Seifert, Erica J. Politics of Authenticity in Presidential Campaigns, 1976–2008. New York: McFarland, 2012. Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. [1977]. New York: Norton, 1992. Smith, Jeff. The Presidents We Imagine: Two Centuries of White House Fictions on the Page, on the Stage, Onscreen, and Online. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. Souza, Pete. The Rise of Barack Obama. Chicago, IL: Triumph Books, 2008. Stone, Lawrence. “Family Values in a Historical Perspective.” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Harvard University, November 16–17, 1994. 67–110. Süddeutsche Zeitung. “Privates soll privat bleiben.” Süddeutsche.de, January 14, 2014. Vanity Fair. The Style Issue, September 2008. Valderrama, María D. “Macron, un ‘Kennedy’ para reformar la República.” Elmundo.es, August 31, 2016. Wagner, Richard. “Die zu Guttenbergs: Das Paar in unseren Trämen.” Faz.net, January 2, 2011. Washington, George. “First Inaugural Address, April 30, 1789.” My Fellow Citizens: The Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States, 1789–2009. Eds. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Fred L. Israel. New York: Facts on File Library of American History, 2009. 1–5. Weiss, Christine. Der US-Präsident als Inszenierung: Ehe, Familie und Privates in der politischen Kommunikation. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2008. Wills, Garry. “Washington’s Citizen Virtue: Greenough and Houdon.” Critical Inquiry 10. 3 (1984): 420–440. Zuckerman, Mortimer B. “The Anti-President: President Barack Obama’s Aloof Style is Responsible for the Cruel Slide from Hope and Change to Partisan Gridlock.” U.S. News & World Report, December 5, 2014.

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21 LINCOLN IN AFRICA1 Kevin Gaines

Introduction Given the global circulation of the image, legend, and legacy of Abraham Lincoln as a consummate symbol of American democracy and freedom, it should come as no surprise that from the middle of the twentieth century until the early1960s, as Africans fought for national independence from colonial subjugation, young African nationalists would find inspiration in Lincoln’s life for their aspirations for self-determination. A more direct historical link between Lincoln and Africa is that, ironically, Lincoln supported the voluntary colonization, or resettlement, of emancipated blacks to Africa. He was hardly unique in this regard, sharing the widespread belief that whites would never accept blacks as equals in the United States. Throughout the antebellum era, colonization to Africa remained a far more popular, and ambiguous, form of opposition to slavery than the more radical position of abolitionism. Colonizationists encompassed pro-slavery politicians as well as anti-slavery Republicans, including Harriet Beecher Stowe. Like Stowe, many viewed the resettlement of African Americans to their ancestral homeland in largely religious terms. Colonization, in their view, promised redemption from the horrors of slavery, as former slaves enacted divine providence through the evangelization of Africa. With this objective in mind, Presbyterians established what became Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, renamed in honor of the fallen emancipator, for the purpose of training Africans and African Americans to spread the gospel in Africa. In 1957, Lincoln University’s most illustrious African graduate, Kwame Nkrumah, presided over the independence of the West African nation of Ghana as its first Prime Minister. Nkrumah pursued an ambitious agenda of African continental union and liberation that brought him both worldwide fame and notoriety, while engaging quite substantively with the meaning of Lincoln’s legacy, and its implications for his nation, and Africa. As perhaps the crowning irony in this story of historical affinities between Africa and America, Nkrumah and Lincoln were again linked in 2009, the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth and the centennial of Nkrumah’s. While the record of commentary about Lincoln among educated, English-speaking Africans is far from voluminous, there is enough of it to raise several intriguing questions. How did Africans obtain information about Lincoln? What did Lincoln’s image mean to them? 254

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And finally, why was this fascination with Lincoln among an admittedly select group of African leaders so fleeting? To fully understand Africans’ fascination with Lincoln, it’s helpful to note the complexity of African Americans’ views of Lincoln. In his oration at the Freedmen’s dedication of the monument to Abraham Lincoln in Washington D.C. in 1876, Frederick Douglass made the classic statement of African Americans’ ambivalence toward Lincoln. Compelled by the occasion to speak unvarnished truth, Douglass noted that Lincoln had been “the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men,” ready, at least in the early years of his administration, to sacrifice the human rights of blacks in order to uphold the welfare of whites. “[Y]ou and yours were the objects of his deepest affection and his most earnest solicitude. You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity.” Still, Douglass allowed that although “the Union was more to him than our freedom or our future, under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood.” Lincoln had been no abolitionist, but his moderation helped assure the demise of slavery. “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”2 Little wonder that Lincoln provided the contested terrain upon which blacks would continue to debate the meaning of their existence in the United States. Fond memories of Lincoln the emancipator clashed with the unsentimental view of Lincoln the pragmatist, susceptible to the prejudices of his era, and the subject of Lincoln could elicit sharp tensions between integrationists and nationalists, radicals and conservatives, at times in explosive fashion. In 1933, Arthur Schomburg, the Afro-Puerto Rican scholar and collector of all manner of books, manuscripts, prints, and paintings by or related to people of African descent, bolted angrily from a Brooklyn meeting at which he was guest speaker. The chair of the meeting, the black journalist Ted Poston, had disputed Schomburg’s claim that Lincoln was a man without prejudice. Poston countered that if left up to Lincoln, African Americans would still be slaves, a statement that infuriated Schomburg.3 However disputed his legacy, African Americans have enlisted Lincoln’s image to mobilize ideological support for their own freedom struggles. Historian Scott Sandage identifies the 1939 concert by Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial as setting the tone for the civil rights movement’s strategies of nonviolent protest. Black activists, Sandage argues, “refined a politics of memory at the Lincoln Memorial,” promulgating a civic religion of national unity and consensus to help amplify the voices of blacks and legitimate the cause of civil rights in national politics. Noting the “ambivalent relationship between African Americans and the icon called Abraham Lincoln,” Sandage notes that black civil rights leaders “strategically appropriated Lincoln’s memory and monument as political weapons, in the process layering and changing the public meanings of the hero and his shrine.”4 Though Africans may not have engaged Abraham Lincoln’s image and memory as extensively and with as conflicted feelings as did African Americans, nevertheless, a process of appropriation comparable to that described by Sandage seems to be at work. Just as the struggle for equality shaped African American appropriations of Lincoln, Africans similarly viewed Lincoln as a resource in their opposition to European colonialism from the mid-1880s to the 1960s. The references in the historical record that I have been able to locate suggest Lincoln’s appeal as a symbol of freedom. In Africa, as throughout the rest of the world, Lincoln has proven to be a most malleable icon. 255

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How did English-speaking Africans, by and large, learn about Lincoln? Most likely, Africans received knowledge of Lincoln in two ways. One probable path to such knowledge was through the cultural influence of American, African American, and British missionary educators in West, Central, and Southern Africa, from the late nineteenth century well into the twentieth. During the late nineteenth century, the travels of African American seamen to Cape Town, one of the busiest port cities in Africa, provided another source of knowledge about Lincoln. In addition, African American jubilee vocal quartets toured internationally, and during the late nineteenth century, such groups performed in every major city in South Africa. According to historian James Campbell, these pathways of communication provided a wide range of Africans, whether educated or not, a basic familiarity with African American history and its central narrative of slavery and emancipation. Such knowledge would have provided a sturdy foundation for the turn of the century collaboration between black South African ministers and African American missionaries of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.5 From the mid-nineteenth century onward, another source of knowledge about Lincoln came from African American colleges such as Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, which also enrolled students from the African continent, with the purpose of training them for missionary efforts back home. These American-educated Africans would have been important additional sources of information about the reform movement of emancipation and freedman’s education, within which Lincoln’s image would have loomed large, particularly as part of Emancipation day celebrations among blacks for generations after his death. Indeed, during the early twentieth century there is evidence that American and African American missionaries invoked the memory of Lincoln to generate ideological and material support for African missionary work. It should be noted here that American missionaries, black or white, were invariably trespassers in a field that European missionaries and colonial authorities viewed as their proprietary domain. By the late nineteenth century, when the white South’s campaign to reverse the civil and political rights gained by African Americans under Reconstruction was in full swing, many African American missionaries in Africa were at pains to defend their fitness for citizenship and equality by asserting their unique contribution to the uplift and redemption of Africa. Invoking Lincoln in their promotional literature also may have been an attempt to resuscitate the flagging spirit of abolitionism and evangelical reform. Lincoln was introduced into the promotional discourse by missionaries of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the African American National Baptist Convention (NBC), and the predominantly white American Baptist Home Mission Society, raising the possibility that stories about Lincoln would have entered the curriculum of these missionary schools.6 One source of information for English-speaking Africans of the independence era may have been a series of religious tracts published during the 1940s by London’s Sheldon Press on behalf of the International Committee on Christian Literature for Africa, also based in London. The series, the African Home Library, featured brief biographies of such figures as “Harriet Tubman: Who Led the Slaves to Freedom,” William Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury, and Abraham Lincoln. Selections in the African Home Library were not confined to the theme of slavery and abolition, as suggested by the abovementioned works. These lives of Tubman, Wilberforce and Lincoln were listed alongside books adapted from Old and New Testament stories and the like. Mrs. George Schwab, an American writer listed as the author of the life of Lincoln, hewed closely to the familiar myths about her subject, including his aptitude for physical labor, his youthful hunger for education, his honesty and kindness, and above all, his opposition to slavery, which, along with the matter of Lincoln’s piety, was substantially overstated. The Gettysburg Address was reprinted in Schwab’s book. The lesson Schwab drew from Lincoln’s assassination was the peaceful succession of power, indicating 256

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the strength of a “government of the people and for the people.” More research is needed to discern whether books from the African Home Library were circulated in Africa, and if so, to what locations. Interestingly, with the permission of the International Committee on Christian Literature for Africa and the Sheldon Press, a Mende language version of the Schwab text was published in the West African British colony of Sierra Leone in 1955.7 If the purveyors of such tracts in English, Mende, or any other African languages intended to secure the allegiance of Africans to the colonial status quo, theirs was a risky approach. Indeed, great men and women in the British and American histories of abolition and emancipation would likely be irresistible objects of study for young English-speaking colonial subjects striving for self-respect and political independence. The historian Derek Peterson writes of a rhetoric of abolitionism in the writings of Kenyans imprisoned by the British, as a means of exposing and condemning the abuses of colonial authorities. By associating their plight with slavery, detainees also asserted themselves as the true exemplars and guardians of what they considered to be British standards of justice and civilization.8 Though fragmentary, this historical background suggests that it would not be entirely unexpected that Africans would reference Lincoln or quote from his speeches and writings. Just as Lincoln’s familiar image and legacy would have been serviceable to missionary educators of Africans, so, it seemed, that Lincoln resonated with young Africans as a symbol of their own aspirations for freedom and liberation. Or, as we will see, Lincoln’s words and example might provide rhetorical support for the political arguments and nation-building strategies of post-independence African leaders. For young Africans of the nationalist generation, coming of age in the mid-twentieth century amidst the humiliations of colonialism, Lincoln’s image, alongside knowledge of histories of African resistance to Western conquest, and African American freedom struggles, all were resources in their formative struggles for intellectual independence, cultural identity, and moral authority. Nelson Mandela, a boyhood convert to Methodism and a product of British colonial schooling, informs us that during the early 1940s, as a student at the University of Fort Hare, a bastion of the liberation movement, he performed the role of John Wilkes Booth in a play on the life of Lincoln. The play had been adapted by Mandela’s classmate, Lincoln Mkentane, who, not surprisingly, claimed for himself the title role. This particular identification with Abraham Lincoln raises several questions. Was young Mkentane given his English first name by a teacher, as Mandela, named after Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, had been? Or, did Mkentane’s parents seek an alternative to British imperial history in choosing the name Lincoln? Mandela notes that Lincoln Mkentane had come from a distinguished Transkein family, and that Mkentane’s recitation of the Gettysburg Address received a standing ovation. The play’s moral, as Mandela recalled it, “was that men who take great risks often suffer great consequences.”9 Precisely what was Abraham Lincoln’s appeal to these Fort Hare students and their audience? Was it Lincoln’s penchant for a religious language of suffering, sacrifice and redemption? Or was it Lincoln’s determination in choosing the perilous course of war to save the Union? Did their meditation on the “great risks” taken by Lincoln help reconcile themselves to the necessity of fighting injustice? To return to colonial Kenya, around the same time, roughly the 1940s, Gikuyu university students were required by their instructors to recite the Emancipation Proclamation, as part of a curriculum that resisted British colonial instruction. Through this assignment every student had the opportunity to perform the role of the Great Emancipator, and wartime Commander in Chief. Much more than a mere pedagogical exercise, the act of uttering the words, “I Abraham Lincoln,” and declaring “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United 257

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States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free” could hardly be experienced as anything other than a transgression of the colonial order. At such moments, the Kenyan students and their instructors recast Lincoln’s proclamation as a moment of resistance, voicing a thinly veiled version of their own anticolonial aspirations. “I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free;” saying so conjured an imagined future marked by an end to colonial oppression and a new dispensation of freedom, independence, and power.10 These are just two examples, but they attest to much more than the fact that knowledge of Lincoln was available to young Africans of the nationalist era. Indeed, Lincoln’s pivotal role in the African American narrative of slavery and freedom made him an icon of anticolonial resistance. During the 1930s, through the efforts of Lincoln University, which served a predominantly black student body, and was located in Pennsylvania, the name of “the Great Emancipator” would be associated with the training of West Africans intent on their own liberation, several of whom would hold leadership positions in post-independence African governments. Nnamdi Azikiwe, President of Nigeria, and Kwame Nkrumah, the Prime Minister of Ghana, were among the most prominent of Lincoln’s African alumni. At Lincoln, Nkrumah and Azikiwe interacted with its largely African American student body, became acquainted with the school’s abolitionist public culture, and undoubtedly learned of African Americans’ mixed feelings about Abraham Lincoln.11 While it is difficult to know the extent of the circulation of Mrs. Schwab’s primer on Lincoln throughout Africa, some of those destined for leadership made political use of their knowledge of Lincoln. Julius Nyerere, Prime Minister of Tanganyika, invoked Lincoln’s defense of the principle “all men are created equal” against the Know Nothing Party’s racism and nativism in support of Nyerere’s insistence on non-racialism as the basis for Tanganyikan citizenship, opposing the claim by parliamentarians that citizenship be limited to indigenous Africans, effectively excluding whites, South Asians, and Arabs. “When the know-nothings get control,” Nyerere quoted Lincoln, it will read, all men are created equal except the negroes and foreigners and [C] atholics. When it comes to that…I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty, where despotism can be taken pure, without the base alloy of hypocrisy. Carrying the day with his argument, Nyerere noted the slippery slope that would result from breaking the principle of nonracial citizenship, predicting the day “when we will say people were created equal except the Masai, except the Wagogo, …etc. We will continue breaking these principles.”12 Kwesi Armah, Ghana’s High Commissioner in London, drew even more extensively on Lincoln’s words to defend Ghana’s neutrality in the Cold War conflict between the US and the Soviet Union. Lincoln was instrumental to Armah’s plea that the superpowers avoid nuclear catastrophe. Referencing two fallen presidents in the same breath, Armah wrote, “… I kept harking back to the words spoken by my boyhood hero, Abraham Lincoln, a century, almost to the day, before we took a sad farewell of John Kennedy.” Quoting from the Gettysburg Address, Armah alluded to Lincoln and Kennedy as “those honoured dead” resolving “that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth…” For Armah, the survival of life on earth, rather than the experiment of American democracy, was at stake. In reiterating his position of 258

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nonalignment with respect to the Cold War, Armah “humbly” rephrased Lincoln’s words: “A world divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this world cannot endure permanently, half-slave and half free.”13 Through Lincoln’s image, Armah linked the destinies of Africa and America, joining the history of the United States, once a fledgling union fighting for its survival in a Civil War, with the challenges facing Ghana and other new African states. Writing during the tumultuous days of the US civil rights movement, Armah’s gloss on Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom,” urged support for racial equality. For Armah, such a “new birth” also encompassed the ongoing liberation struggles against white minority rule in southern Africa. Armah’s rephrasing “without apology” of the quote from Lincoln’s House divided speech not only asserted the unsustainability of superpower conflict, but also suggested that the Cold War was in fact a diversion from addressing the fundamental inequality of the global order, “half slave and half free.”14 In quoting Lincoln, Armah followed the example of his boss, Kwame Nkrumah, whose engagement with Lincoln’s image and memory was arguably as sustained as that of any other African leader of his day. In coming to the United States for his education, Nkrumah, like Azikiwe, diverged from the usual pursuit by Anglophone Africans of advanced degrees in England. Nkrumah took to heart Azikiwe’s advice that a British education might dampen his anticolonial fervor, and resided in the US for over a decade beginning in 1935, receiving bachelors and masters’ degrees from Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania. A brief account of Lincoln University is in order here. The University was the product of the nineteenth-century colonization movement, which, in the form of the American Colonization Society, purchased land in West Africa in 1821 in what is now Liberia for the purpose of resettling emancipated blacks. Much of the political and material support for the project of colonization was provided by pro-slavery elements in the US government and clergy who believed that free blacks were unassimilable into the US body politic. The substantial number of free blacks in the North whose sympathies lay with the growing abolitionist movement denounced colonization as a plot to weaken resistance to slavery. However, some African Americans independently advocated emigration to Africa, in part influenced by the precedent established during the late eighteenth century by Presbyterian leaders to train African Americans for evangelical work in Africa. Throughout the nineteenth century, free blacks and African American leadership maintained an ambivalent relationship to Africa, generally opposing colonization, but open to emigration at moments whenever their freedom and citizenship were under attack, as was the case in the 1850s, with the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott Decision. The “back to Africa” sentiment espoused by quite distinct actors, including white colonizationists, African American emigrationists, and evangelical clergy, provided the context for the founding of Lincoln University. In 1853, the Presbyterian minister John Miller Dickey of Oxford, Pennsylvania, preached a sermon calling for the establishment of a college devoted to “the scientific, classical, and theological education of the colored youth of the male sex.” With the approval of the Presbyterian General Assembly, the school was chartered in 1854 as Ashmun Institute, named as a tribute to a white colonizationist who perished attempting to establish a colony of former slaves in Liberia. Lincoln’s founders sought to train African Americans and Africans to serve as religious leaders in Liberia, and with divine assistance, elevate Africans “intellectually, morally, and politically, to equal dignity with other races of mankind.” In 1866, Dickey changed the name of Ashmun Institute to Lincoln University. The evolution of Lincoln’s role in educating Africans is significant; between 1870 and 1895, 28 Liberians and one African from Gabon were enrolled. From 1896–1924, 23 South Africans and three Liberians 259

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enrolled. Between 1929 and 1960, there were 134 students from British West Africa, and 30 others, including eight from East Africa and eight from Liberia. It was during this time, that Nkrumah and Azikiwe received their training at Lincoln.15 While Lincoln University has demonstrated a unique commitment to the education of Africans, its character evolved considerably from its antebellum origins. Like other historically black colleges, Lincoln was transformed by the New Negro radicalism and militancy of the 1920s. That decade witnessed student protests and revolts on several campuses by African American youth against the paternalism and conservatism of often-white controlled black colleges. This was the militant environment that African students entered and contributed to, not only at Lincoln, but also at other leading black institutions, including Fisk, Howard, and Hampton Institute.16 Nkrumah seems to have arrived at Lincoln with his nationalist politics and political ambitions fully formed. He forged deep connections with the Africa-conscious segment of the African American intelligentsia. He immersed himself in Harlem’s vibrant public culture, its political parties, left, right, and center, its street corner orators, rousing church services, and public meetings on African history held at the Schomburg Library.17 Years later, upon his return to the US as Prime Minister of the new nation of Ghana, Nkrumah was greeted by euphoric, raucous African American crowds. A forceful critic of colonialism, Nkrumah was widely admired by African Americans, particularly those nostalgic for Marcus Garvey’s message of black self-reliance and pan-African unity and solidarity. Unlike Garvey, convicted in 1927 of mail fraud in a suspect federal prosecution and deported to Jamaica, Nkrumah had succeeded in gaining the power and resources to lend concrete support to Africans still struggling against colonial rule. He had insisted that Ghana’s independence was meaningless without the total liberation of the African continent, and as a gesture of solidarity with the US civil rights movement, he had invited Martin Luther King, fresh from his success as leader of the Montgomery Bus boycott, to Ghana’s independence ceremonies in 1957. Nkrumah believed that Africa and Africans should cultivate an independent voice and influence in world affairs, and did his part, hosting the fiercely anti-colonial All African Peoples’ Conference in Ghana in 1958. But Nkrumah walked a fine line between his support for African nationalist movements still struggling for independence and his ardent pursuit of U.S. assistance for the construction of a hydroelectric dam at Ghana’s Volta River, the centerpiece of his plans for Ghana’s industrial development and modernization.18 Having dealt with hostile elements in the British press, Nkrumah was eager to sway public and Congressional opinion to his favor in the US During his whirlwind visit to the U.S. in 1958, Nkrumah visited the Lincoln Memorial, the scene of pro-civil rights demonstrations with Marion Anderson’s Easter Sunday concert in 1939, and the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom the year before, at which Martin Luther King delivered his “Give Us the Ballot” speech. At the memorial, Nkrumah laid a wreath, mingled with tourists, and posed for several photographs in front of the massive statue of Lincoln. It is worth noting that Nkrumah also paid a visit to Mount Vernon, the residence of George Washington, a curious backdrop for communicating a pro-civil rights message. The memorial’s recent use by supporters of civil rights was not lost on Nkrumah and his State Department handlers. Both would have embraced the visual association with Lincoln as a symbol of emancipation and an American civic religion of freedom and democracy. Posed in front of the statue, impeccably attired and aloof of expression, sharing the frame with white tourists in the background, and the disembodied folded hands of his escort officer, Nkrumah’s image as head of state seemed far removed from the stock visual representation of the hierarchical relationship of Lincoln to the freed slave, described by David Brion Davis as 260

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“the emancipation moment.”19 At the request of the US government, the occasion of Nkrumah’s visit to the Lincoln Memorial was commemorated on a postage stamp issued by Ghana marking the Lincoln Sesquicentennial in 1959. In that stamp, Nkrumah is posed in front of the statue, his forward-looking gaze echoing that of Lincoln’s marble visage. Ghana circulated visual images of Lincoln once again in 1965 to mark the centennial of Lincoln’s assassination, issuing four Lincoln commemorative stamps. Nkrumah’s visit to the Lincoln Memorial anticipated the United States Information Service’s massive global outreach campaign occasioned by the Lincoln Sesquicentennial in 1959. During the Cold War, US officials believed that educating overseas audiences about Lincoln helped project a salutary image of American democracy. Toward that goal, the USIS and the Voice of America sent out massive packets of film documentaries, taped radio programs and scripts, lectures, essays, photo exhibits, pamphlets, and comic strips on Lincoln, charging U.S. Embassies to mount programs on or around Lincoln’s birthday. The USIA programs marking Lincoln’s 150th birthday were tightly controlled. At the height of the Cold War, US officials were keenly aware of the potential for criticism of the nation’s present-day racial conflicts. Steering clear of such controversial topics, the USIS emphasized a mythic view of Lincoln that avoided the sort of candid critique offered by Frederick Douglass.

Figure 21.1 Kwame Nkrumah, 1958

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Figure 21.2 Ghana commemorative stamps, 1965

On the whole, the USIS and Embassy officials seemed unaware of an indigenous awareness of Lincoln, or of African American history, that might have enriched the quality and reception of Lincoln among African audiences. US officials seemed intent on diverting Africans’ discussions of Lincoln away from the burning issue of civil rights in the U.S., an objective that Nkrumah seems to have resisted in his remarks delivered for the Voice of America broadcast, “In Search of Lincoln.” Nkrumah stated that Lincoln’s significance for Africans was his role in “the eventual emancipation of peoples of African descent in the United States,” and ending the “evil” of slavery. Noting the continuing need for vigilance in the name of justice and equal treatment, Nkrumah lamented that Lincoln’s egalitarianism “tends to be forgotten even in these enlightened times.”20 Early in 1962, Nkrumah finalized an agreement with the US government, and the USbased Kaiser Corporation to build the Volta River dam project. But so desperate was he to see the project through that Nkrumah accepted terms that benefited Ghana far less than he had originally hoped. Later that year, he would be seriously wounded in an assassination attempt. He had been chastened by the Cold War’s impact on African affairs, and increasingly suspicious that the US was seeking to destabilize Ghana. Ironically, Lincoln and the United States of America provided the model for his vision of African unity, a United States of Africa. In 1963, Nkrumah published his book Africa Must Unite, its appearance timed to coincide with the inaugural meeting of the Organization of African Unity in Ethiopia. This book was the ideological centerpiece, throughout Africa and the West, for Nkrumah’s pursuit of an African continental union government. Nkrumah cited several precedents in making his case for a political union of African states. He lauded Simon Bolivar’s vision, sadly thwarted, of a Union of South American States. In Nkrumah’s view, perhaps influenced by the disappointing Volta dam negotiations, political unity was a vital pre-condition for Africa’s economic development. In unity, Africa stood a greater chance of resisting balkanization and conditions of economic neo-colonialism imposed by the West. Where Bolivar failed, Lincoln had succeeded. 262

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The United States of America, but for the firm resolve of Abraham Lincoln to maintain the union of the states, might well have fallen into a disintegration which would have barred the way to the tremendous acceleration of development that an enormous agglomeration of land, resources and people made possible. For Nkrumah, the choice was clear. The fragmentation of “national exclusivism” was to be rejected for the road of union.21 For Nkrumah, Lincoln was the true founder of the modern United States of America, in effect, the architect of its vast industrial might. It was Lincoln’s victory in the Civil War that imposed the Union on the vanquished South. Noting Lincoln’s reluctance to interfere with the institution of slavery, Nkrumah argued that the survival of the Union required the abolition of slavery. Writing at a moment in which much of southern Africa remained under the control of white minority rule, Nkrumah argued that Lincoln’s eventual embrace of emancipation justified “our Pan-African stand that complete freedom is imperative for African Unity.” Again, Nkrumah stressed the direct relationship between the continuance of the Union and the nation’s industrial expansion.22 What was behind Nkrumah’s strategic references to Lincoln in his arguments in support of African Union government? Insofar as Nkrumah was addressing Westerners, particularly Americans, his historical allusions to Lincoln as the savior and architect of the modern United States were perhaps intended to counter Western perceptions of fundamental differences between Africa and Europe (or the West more generally, inclusive of the United States). Nkrumah may have been trying to overcome what Valentin Mudimbe identified as a nineteenth-century problem, in which European and American writers claimed “the complete lack of similarity between the two continents and attempted to prove that in Africa the physical environment, the flora and fauna, as well as the people, represent relics of a remote age of antiquity.”23 Fellow African heads of state were another crucial audience for Nkrumah’s discussion of Lincoln. Yet one suspects that Nkurmah’s emphasis on Lincoln’s act of securing the Union by force of arms as Commander in Chief would strike rival African heads of state as a most worrisome argument for African union government. In any case, Nkrumah failed to persuade enough fellow African heads of state of the virtues and necessity of African unity. Nkrumah, who embarked on an increasingly confrontational stance toward the US and the West, was overthrown by a military coup in 1966 while away from Ghana. From exile, he remained a leading spokesman for African liberation. But talk of Lincoln was nowhere to be found in his later political writings. Nor would other African leaders find in Lincoln a compelling exemplar for their political agendas. By the late 1960s and beyond, as African liberation movements in Southern Africa met with violent repression and embraced armed struggle, Africans could look closer to home for examples of martyrdom. Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected Prime Minister of the Congo, ousted by a secession, and slain by Belgian troops in 1961, was such an example. Frantz Fanon was an early advocate of armed struggle for the African revolution, and was widely viewed as a martyr, though leukemia was the cause of his untimely death. There were other African martyrs, victims of political assassination, including Amilcar Cabral, Tom Mboya, Eduardo Mondlane, and Chris Hani. Nelson Mandela, released from prison in 1991 after 27 years, became a universal symbol of sacrifice and reconciliation worthy of a Lincoln. The moment of Lincoln’s appeal among African leaders was fleeting. It reflected a brief span of some 30 years, from the 1930s to the 1960s, when many African nationalists viewed the United States as an anticolonial ally, in large part due to their identification with African Americans’ freedom struggles. Just as significant was the fact that for many young Africans, in 263

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comparison to Europe’s colonial empires, the US seemed largely untainted by colonialism, and Lincoln, as emancipator, common man, and martyr epitomized the nation’s democratic promise. By the mid-1960s, supporters of African liberation realized that colonialism in Africa would not yield without armed struggle and bloodshed. To those fighting for social justice in the US it was apparent that civil rights legislation had failed to solve persistent problems including poverty, war, inadequate housing and schools. For African Americans and Africans demanding self-determination, Lincoln’s image was diminished, from the majestic icon of freedom on the Mall to the two-dimensional racial paternalism of “the emancipation moment,” the image that had crystallized African Americans’ ambivalence toward Lincoln. Another likely explanation for the paucity of references to Lincoln by the late 1960s is the growing perception among Africans of the US as an enemy to African aspirations. Just as the meaning of Lincoln’s image was transformed in the minds of African Americans, so did the image of the US suffer at home and abroad in the context of the Vietnam War, the assassinations and urban rebellions of the late 1960s, and continuing racial strife. This critical stance toward the US as global hegemon opposed to African liberation was a profound departure from the favorable perception of many African nationalists from the 1930s to the early 1960s who viewed the United States as a more favorable environment than England for Africans seeking higher education. All told, there are many Lincolns, or many sides of Lincoln, with which Africans might identify, or ignore, as the case may be. There is Lincoln the emancipator. But for Africans who gained their freedom from colonialism through armed struggle, the idea of emancipation by edict might seem unrealistic. There is the Lincoln of the Civil War, the defender of the Union, and here it is true that the press often compared Lincoln with Nigeria’s General Gowon, who kept that nation together in the face of the Biafran Civil War of 1967. Then there is Lincoln as agent of national reconciliation. For playing a similar role in post-apartheid South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu received the Lincoln Leadership Prize of the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., in 2008. And there is Lincoln, the deeply flawed white racist and advocate of colonization who, nevertheless, was capable of extraordinary growth under extreme duress, an image of him handed down to us by Frederick Douglass, but curiously, one that does not appear to have caught on among those Africans who invoke his memory. With the worldwide interest in Barack Obama, whose admiration for Lincoln is well known, there is the possibility of a revival of interest in Lincoln among Africans. But if the engagement with Lincoln’s political thought and role in US history is to flourish, it will necessarily have to bring Lincoln’s legacy to bear on contemporary African problems of political conflict, autocratic governance, and the need for greater protection of the rights of minorities and women in African states. No doubt young Africans continue to have access to information on the life and career of Lincoln, through their schooling, and perhaps the internet. In retrospect, Africans’ engagement with Lincoln was too superficial—even opportunistic—to displace other pre- and post-colonial historical figures from their political imagination, and thus to have lasting significance. Think of the Ashanti woman warrior, Yaa Asantewa, who led military resistance against British colonizers during the late nineteenth century. Today, years after Lincoln’s name captured the hope and idealism of young Africans’ struggles for national independence, there seems to be a certain symmetry of misrecognition between Africans and Americans. With few exceptions, Africans, by and large, no longer view Lincoln as relevant to their present-day problems and challenges; a significant number of Americans seem dimly aware, if not resistant, to a reckoning of the place of Africa in the history of the US, its origins and founding as a slave society, the crisis of the Civil War, and emancipation. As US citizens living in an interdependent world, having marked the 264

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bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth and the centennial of Nkrumah’s, we are all inheritors of the continuing quest for racial and social justice in the United States, and in the world.24

Notes 1 This chapter is published with the permission of Oxford University Press and is a version of a previously published work, “From Colonization to Anti-colonialism: Lincoln in Africa” by Kevin Gaines in The Global Lincoln edited by Richard Carwardine and Jay Sexton, published by Oxford University Press in 2011. 2 Frederick Douglass, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=39. 3 Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 202–203. 4 Scott Sandage, “A Marble House Divided: The Lincoln Memorial, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Politics of Memory, 1939–1963,” The Journal of American History (June 1993), p. 136. 5 James Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 125–127. 6 David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 306; T.J. Morgan, “What Spelman Stands For.” Spelman Messenger (Dec 1901), pp. 1– 7; and Lewis G. Jordan, “Where is the Money?” Mission Herald (Aug 1912), p. 2. For a recent study of the activities of African American missionaries in Africa, see Brandi Hughes, “Middle Passages: The Redemption of African America in the African Mission Field, 1862–1905,” Ph.D Dissertation, Yale University, 2008. 7 Mrs. George Schwab, Abraham Lincoln (London: The Sheldon Press, 194?); George Schwab, Ebraham Linco_n/nyiemo_i mame_i (Bo: Sierra Leone: Protectorate Literature Bureau, 1955). 8 Derek R. Peterson, “The Intellectual Lives of Mau Mau Detainees,” Journal of Modern African History, 49 (2008), pp. 73–91. 9 Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1994), p. 40. 10 Derek Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004), pp. 154–155. 11 Indeed, Azikiwe scornfully quoted Lincoln’s negative view of African Americans, as articulated during the Lincoln-Douglas debates: “…I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing in any way the social and political equality of the white and the black races….” Nnamdi Azikiwe, Liberia in World Politics (London: Arthur H. Stockwell, Ltd., 1934), pp. 40–41, quoted in Evelyn Rowand, “The Effect of Lincoln University on the Leaders of British West Africa,” (Master’s Thesis, Department of History, University of Alberta, 1964), pp. 27–28. 12 Julius K. Nyerere, Freedom and Unity: Uhuru na Umoja: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1952– 1965 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 126–129. 13 Kwesi Armah, Africa’s Golden Road (London: Heinemann, 1965), p. 142. 14 Ibid. 15 Evelyn Rowand, “The Effect of Lincoln University Upon the Leaders of British West Africa,” (M.A. Thesis, University of Alberta, Department of History, 1964), pp. 4–7. 16 Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), p. 33. 17 Marika Sherwood, Kwame Nkrumah: The Years Abroad (Legon, Ghana: Freedom Publications, 1996); Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (New York: Nelson, 1957). 18 Gaines, American Africans in Ghana. 19 Sandage, “A Marble House Divided,” p. 148. 20 I am indebted to Jay Sexton for sharing these remarks of Nkrumah to the Voice of America in a personal communication with the author. 21 Kwame Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite (London: Heinemann, 1963), p. 189. 22 Ibid., pp. 210–211. 23 V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 107. 24 I am indebted to David W. Cohen for this insight.

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There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. (Derrida 1996) This autographic violence and fiction are to be found at work as much in what one calls the individual autobiography as in the “historical” origin of states. (Derrida 2014)

Organizing amnesia In a moment characterized by a growing movement to legislate the “right to be forgotten”1 as a “human right,” an analysis of the archival gesture and the production of memory, especially in relation to national memory and its messianic trajectory as suggested in the autobiographies of both Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela,2 indicates an aporetic or at least paradoxical relation to an ethics of forgiving and forgetting which has a bearing on national and political reconciliation today. At a time when private individuals seek the digital erasure of pasts, the political autobiography may effect an apparent “imaginative amnesty,” forgiving national pasts in a reconciliation aimed at figuring a democratic future-to-come; yet the problem arises of whether such imagined formations—a “post-racial” America or “post-Apartheid” South Africa—as these narratives may promise if not document, of whether the persistence of these texts’ exceptionalist poetics and politics functions to forget a reality, which, like the return of the repressed, inevitably comes to haunt the streets of these nation-states, a haunting that manifests in familiar forms: police brutality and shootings of unarmed black men in towns and cities across the United States, and xenophobic riots throughout South Africa, for example. Working like the archontic aspects of the archive as we have come to understand it through Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, effecting a “commencement” and pronouncing a “commandment,” the genre of the political autobiography conceals while it purports to 266

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reveal, buries what it lays out: it violates its truth claim in what may arguably be a quintessentially political power play that kills or sacrifices “life writing”—the biopolitics of individual memory embodied in the genre of the autobiographical—while politics “as usual” survives. What is it that “political autobiography” does for us today, in our precarious nation-states? What does it seek, in the case of Obama’s Dreams from My Father, to affirm, to gather up, and, in doing so, what does it allow to be forgotten and to be forgiven? Why today, in the face of the Googlization of globalization of geopolitics—commonly summarized under the term “googlement”—is a narrative structure of this kind, a narrative structure perhaps nowhere more perfectly modeled than in Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom yet a viable modality in the work of sustaining the nation and its status quo, while it is nevertheless broadly read as a model document of individual transformation and national liberation?3 In Archive Fever, the drive to archive—what Jacques Derrida spoke of so presciently over twenty years ago as a kind of fever4 which we can today see as proliferating and accelerating in all data gathering and processing search engines, social media, and the like—is inextricably connected with the founding of (more literally, the foundation of) the law and state; and it is also bound, death-drive like, to its destruction. Doing the work of preserving the record for posterity, the archive may appear as a device against forgetting, a forthright mechanism of memory, yet Derrida’s assertion that it is also and concurrently a structure of forgetting complicates the effect and identity of its production. If the archive of the event says, “Gone, but not forgotten,” perhaps the Derridean hauntological revision of the archive might (worryingly) read, “Forgotten, but not gone.” Derrida observes that the Greek word arkheion names the house of the archons:5 “The citizens who thus held and signified political power were considered to possess the right to make or to represent the law” (Derrida 1996, 1–2).6 This private sphere—the house—that becomes public, the institution, is an “unusual place” and a “place of election where law and singularity intersect in privilege” (Derrida 1996, 3). Although the metaphor of the house as the site of political power and legislative origins is a familiar one, from The White House and the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., to countless other similarly named palaces of political power worldwide (on a smaller scale, even every American president’s home is turned into a small museum as is the case with any home of Mandela’s left standing7), the concept of the archive itself derives much of its importance through its apparent mechanistic rather than symbolic work. In defining the term further, Derrida goes on to say that “archontic power” denotes “the power of consignation”—here, meaning, “to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration” (Derrida 1996, 3). Such unification of an ideal configuration is very much in line with the exceptionalist poetics of the political autobiography and its patriarchal heritage,8 but it is also indicative of the force of the archive’s authority to present a unifiable construct and dynamic—despite multiple and different versions recorded in an archive, they testify to the same “event” or contribute to the unique unity of the exception, the status of which is such that it is set apart or aside as significant precisely for the sake of its singularity. For the purposes of this discussion then, I am reiterating the relevance of the underlying congruence of the archive and the political, of the elite and the elected, in order to underscore the complexity of its apparent objectivity and universalism, gathered under the one roof, or name, or website, or project. Perhaps the archive should be approached as contested rather than hallowed ground; despite the reverence which it garners as a source of fact translatable to truth or experience, we might be better served by recognizing just how material the archive has become in both its content and its form (even if that form is “virtual” or “digital”); thus while the archive is very much the mechanism through which so much 267

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contemporary research is “authorized” and legitimized, its unification, totality, or exceptionalism contributes to its fetishization: in its appearance, its political work and origins disappear or are forgotten while its historical authority proliferates backward into the past and concurrently into the future. Like the exceptional origins of the nation-state, the representation of the founding is founded on a replacement of the national foundation. Furthermore, the archive’s status as a site of memory, of keeping memory alive, so to speak, suggests that as preserved in an elsewhere, it is also thus shelved, forgotten. Speaking informally, in 1998, in South Africa at the “Refiguring the Archive” conference, Derrida suggests that forgetting is intrinsic to the archival structure, even if nothing is “forgotten”: Even in the case of, let’s say—by hypothesis—a successful archive—even if you really succeed in gathering everything you need in reference to the past, and that you interpret it in a way which is totally satisfactory (then we’ll have here a full archive, correctly interpreted and no one would disagree on the truth and fidelity of this archive, everything is now kept safe and everyone agrees on that; so, we’ll keep this archive safe, okay?). Now, because of that, because of this very fullness, the hypothetical fullness of this archive, what will have been granted is not memory, is not a true memory. It will be forgetting. (Hamilton 2002, 54) Though on one level Derrida is here suggesting that in safe-keeping a memory one can safely “forget” about it until one desires to return to it, he hints that society, in order “to go on, to survive,” may also desire forgetting and safe-keeping concurrently, thus he ventures to add, “And perhaps, perhaps, this is the unconfessed desire of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (Hamilton 2002, 54). That is, forgive and forget—and move on. This is not, however, a structure that Derridean deconstruction validates. In many ways, from the concept of “trace” to “messianicity,” to the “future-to-come,” the consistency and universality of an openness or a vulnerability to a “relation to the future” means that “it is impossible to close the archive” (Hamilton 2002, 46). What may be just as significant to consider in gathering the archive is, Derrida explains, how “this future-oriented structure of the archive is precisely what confronts us with a responsibility, an ethical and political responsibility” (Hamilton 2002, 46). The Apartheid Archive Project, established in 2009, holds that “South Africans […] today, when referring to pre-1994 South Africa, appear to suggest that the excesses of the Apartheid order never really took place…” (Duncan 2014, 283). In order to respond to this condition of forgetting, which is exacerbated by a growing violence and xenophobia9 throughout the major cities of South Africa—a condition that the Apartheid Archive Project sees as “post-facto evidence of the perverse legacy of the apartheid order” (Duncan 2014, 283) but which can be misread only as a failure of the ruling A.N.C.—the project is attempting to create a “vast network of silenced life stories and narratives to be recorded before they are lost to history” (Duncan 2014, 285). Thus this democratic and egalitarian project appears to position itself as an alternative against the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s “tendency to focus on the more ‘dramatic’ or salient narratives of apartheid atrocities” which are “‘grand’ narratives of the past or the privileged narratives of academic, political, and social elites” (Duncan 2014, 285). What seems to be at issue here is the after-effect of the TRC’s own archival gesture of working against itself “albeit unintentionally” (Duncan 2014, 282). It’s an interesting and not uncontroversial stake to claim that the project’s proposed “interrogating” of stories as opposed to (what is implied as the TRC’s) “simply accepting them at face value” (Duncan 268

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2014, 282) will prove to be the proper methodology for curing the forgetting that is supposedly due to the fact “that much of the details of apartheid racism have not been publicly acknowledged or assessed” and will thus counter “the carefully orchestrated amnesia about the past” (Duncan 2014, 285). Sociologist Xolela Mangcu agrees that memory in South Africa is under threat of insufficient archiving and substantiates the general sense that today’s young South Africans are under the wrong impression about their shared historical past (“[O]ur children roll their eyes when we tell them about the past. ‘There you go, exaggerating,’ they say, ‘it wasn’t that bad.’”), a condition partly due to “blockbuster movies such as Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, which uproots Mandela from the historical context of the struggle” (Mangcu 2014, 58). Uprooting Mandela from his context is clearly a way of describing the politics of representation that depicts Mandela as an exceptionalist figure, a universal figure, and therefore beyond perhaps even above his historical context (“The archive,” Derrida says, “always works […] against itself”) (Derrida 1996, 12). Announcing the death of Nelson Mandela, newspaper headlines, it may come as no surprise then, mimicked this same trajectory: “Mandela Taught a Continent to Forgive”; “He Taught the World to Forgive”; “The Conscience of the World”; “Hallowed Be Thy Name.”10 Even more to the point, perhaps, is that this (no doubt undesired and unnecessary) elevation of Mandela to the level of sainted also “forgets” the work of others or collapses theirs into that of Mandela. In thinking of Mandela as the “conscience of the world” or the world’s forgiver, it might be difficult to recall that it was Archbishop Desmond Tutu who “with as much good will as confusion” Derrida notes in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness “introduced the vocabulary of repentance and forgiveness”11 into the process as President of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and thus “christianized the language of an institution uniquely destined to treat ‘politically’ motivated crimes …” (Derrida 2001, 42). Mangcu argues that today’s political climate also has been shaped by similar distortions of memory: There are myriad other ways in which the ANC has distorted the archive. Even as it has reduced the narrative to that of its own achievements and Nelson Mandela, it has failed to sponsor any scholarship around Mandela. […] The governing party has done virtually nothing to promote scholarship around its own leaders—Oliver Tambo, Chris Hani, Joe Slovo, Griffiths and Veronica Mxenge—let alone those it has erased from public memory—Robert Sobukwe, Steve Biko, and others. (Mangcu 2014, 58) Derrida’s dedication of his book Specters of Marx to Chris Hani (who was assassinated only days before the “Whither Marxism” conference) specifically addresses the forgetting that occurs when a person becomes a figure: But one should never speak of the assassination of a man as a figure, not even an exemplary figure in the logic of an emblem, a rhetoric of the flag or of martyrdom. A man’s life, as unique as his death, will always be more than a paradigm and something other than a symbol. (Derrida 1994, xv) Political autobiographies, in establishing or re-establishing the foundations of a nation or a revolutionary movement or tracing the beginnings of a significant “figure,” are doing the work of “organizing amnesia,” effectively enabling an “imaginative amnesty” for the nation 269

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or its people, allowing a great many things to be forgotten—an act, as nineteenth-century French philosopher Ernst Renan observed, according to Derrida’s reading of his 1882 essay, “What is a Nation?”, that is essential to unifying a nation. Derrida writes: [F]orgetting is therefore also constitutive of the history that will have formed a nation. Renan’s thesis, both paradoxical and sensible, is that forgetting makes the unity of a nation, not memory. And, even more interesting, Renan analyzes this forgetting as a kind of repression: it is active, selective, meaningful, in a word, interpretive. Forgetting is not, in the case of a nation, a simple psychological erasure, a wearing out or a meaningless obstacle that makes access to the past more difficult, as if the archive had been destroyed by accident. No, if there is forgetting, it is because one cannot tolerate something at the origin of the nation, an act of violence, no doubt, a traumatic event, some sort of unavowable curse. (Derrida 2008, 293) That the unifying of a nation requires that many things be forgotten is in concert with Nicole Loraux’s assertion in her book The Divided City in which she observes that ancient Athens “founded its political existence on a loss of memory” wherein “politikos is the name of one who knows how to agree to oblivion” (Loraux 2006, 42–43) or to “forgetfulness” or “concealment,” depending on how one translates Lethe. Thus not only does the nascent nation hold that it needs to forget, but it needs to forget much of what it has gathered, whether that is its perceived racial identity, its past history, terrible deeds, or any such concerns. Is it a matter of convenience, one wonders? Who is served by such forgetting? What are its forms? In terms of how it informs the polis, “the foundation,” Derrida says in speaking of the origin of the nation-state as always outside the law and therefore always a violation (that is, a taking on of authority without authorization), and hence violent—“is made in order to hide it, by its essence it tends to organize amnesia, sometimes under the celebration and sublimation of the grand beginnings” (Derrida 2001, 57, emphasis added). Additionally, as Nicole Loraux observes: “the polis, with great consistency, masks itself from the reality of its own processes” (Loraux 2006, 22). What are the parameters and forms of these processes? From the house of the archon to the digital home of today’s archives, what role does the autobiographical play in and alongside the national? What matters when it comes to the political work of these very different structures— the autobiography of a world renowned political hero, or the stories of “everyday racism” lived by unknown numbers of black and white South Africans, the former an exemplary story of one man who represents all12 and the later the community establishing its own voice? When in his autobiography Mandela observes that “Freedom is indivisible,” he goes on to explain that his bond with the people of South Africa is likewise inseparable: “the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me” (Mandela 1995, 624). In common parlance, Mandela is synonymous with the event of the anti-Apartheid struggle and the ANC, and in some significant ways, the form of the political autobiography does not disabuse readers of this impression. These questions point to some relevance that resides in the form as much as in the content of collections and disseminations of memory. Annette Wieviorka has observed that while the twentieth century may properly be called “the Era of the Witness,” it is the form of collecting testimonials as well as their dissemination that will transform the event—in backward fashion, from the future—in ways unimaginable.13 Where orchestrated (for example, by 270

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questionnaires, time allotments, environment) “testimonials” become a substitute for or are even isolated from “the history of historians” (Wieviorka 2006, 116) and analysis, thus the historical object may be obscured by emotion and feeling—or more, forgotten as it is transformed to suit another (politicized) purpose inside the new historical moment, as might arguably be the case with the “‘Americanization’ of the Holocaust.”14 In light of these concerns and recognizing that archives are very much beholden to the authenticity of their content, it is important to nevertheless also analyse how their form might transform what the archive offers the future. For someone like Mangcu, it seems, the archive must simply appear on the scene, inclusively, and with complete availability to scholars whose research will then enact in some way society’s appreciation for or understanding of and identification with the past. This seems idealistic if not just oldfashioned in its nostalgia. Without minimizing the validity of Mangcu’s criticism— “Twenty years after democracy we do not have a single national research institution focused on the black historical experience in the way the Goree Institute or the Smithsonian Institution does in the US” (Mangcu 2014, 60)—that South Africa has yet to establish a state-sponsored, national archive15 of the stature that South Africa deserves in recognition of its anti-Apartheid and black history, the claim that the people are “unable to speak about their experiences for lack of a proper historical archive” (Mangcu 2014, 60) may be difficult (if not also fruitless) to defend. Here, again, the question of the form arises. In ways reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s rereading of the aesthetic and the political in the age of technological reproduction, we might consider what new ways of forgetting—in the digital age of erasure and the right to be forgotten—might today’s technologies be creating through their virtual forms of collecting, archiving, and disseminating. How do narrative structures such as these political autobiographies and their filmic revisions suture or promote the sustenance of the status quo of the national through the guise of the historical, for these narratives also offer transformations of the event, but perhaps do so in a more subtle manner, in a “form” less obviously transforming; what, after all, could be more conservative than the autobiography? Thus the expectation that it is the archive that informs and transforms society may be questioned; because the future of the event as recognized in and by the archive is open, at risk, and vulnerable to the future, not only to interpretation but also to its technology, it calls for a political and social responsibility on our part, as Derrida suggests. When Derrida argues that forgiveness is not institutionalizable but is instead something interpersonal, a face to face dynamic in its purest form, it is clear that Commissions of the “Truth and Reconciliation” model,16 as relevant and powerful and important as they may be for investigating allegations, establishing historical narratives, and preparing reports, are nonetheless “irreconcilable” to forgiveness, which is outside the framework and the authority of the juridical, state structure. This is not to deny the impact of reconciliation: Of course, no one would decently dare to object to the imperative of reconciliation. It would be better to put an end to the crimes and discords. Once again, however, I believe it necessary to distinguish between forgiveness and this process of reconciliation, this reconstitution of a health or a “normality,” as necessary and desirable as it would appear through amnesties, the “work of mourning,” etc. A “finalised” forgiveness is not forgiveness; it is only a political strategy or a psychotherapeutic economy. (Derrida 2001, 50)

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Along these lines, the archival gesture or structure therefore that works as a “political strategy” of forgetting performed as remembering, or the “psycho-therapeutic economy” of a memory by proxy—such as that performed by Obama’s political narrative when, for example, it provides Americans of slave origins a Kenyan story of origins as a kind of therapeutic for an unforgiveable loss of personal history—is sometimes engaged in the “process of reconciliation” as if the archival gesture were always already part of the regimen of a “reconstitution of a health or a ‘normality.’” Michael Sheringham, in his essay, “Memory and the Archive in Contemporary Life Writing” addresses other suspicions of the archive, observing that in this moment “the field of life writing” has shifted from a focus on the individual as an idiosyncratic singularity to where the figure of the archive, and “the related vocabulary of document and trace, have become increasingly prominent…from a focus on the individual to the interaction of the individual and the collective; from exploration of inner life to…where identity is a function of the encounter with others in social space; from a sense that the materials of autobiography are personal to a sense that they derive equally from the social framework of memory” (Sheringham 2005, 49). Taking note of Derrida’s description of the ambivalent and troublesome nature of the archival gesture, Sheringham observes the growing phenomena of “a whole symptomology that makes the recipients of the archive less the beneficiaries of munificence than inheritors of Pandora’s box” (Sheringham 2005, 49); in light of Paul Ricoeur’s sense that an encounter with the archive is always an encounter with interpretation, the movement in the genre of autobiography that Sheringham sees as foregrounding social or collective identity seems, to me, to extend the influence of the consignatory affect of the archival aesthetic. However, a trend in contemporary life writing which highlights a growing consciousness of social memory or of the concept of the archive (and its influence on informing identity) must be distinguished from political autobiography which operates as its own archive, inseparable from its double bind of an exceptionalism that derives from its author’s own transformation into the state—the actual and at the same time synecdochic head of state—as is made clear by both Presidents Obama and Mandela; this appears to then symbolize the transformation of the state, but this is where the aporia rears its ugly head, where amnesia hits hardest. Hence the confusion of how it might be that the election and re-election of an African American president does not signify the end of racism and herald the beginning of an era of “post-racism” in the United States, or anywhere else for that matter.17

Exceptionalist poetics How does Obama’s story work in the lives and stories of Americans? William Hoston, in his Black Masculinity in the Obama Era: Outliers of Society, observes that modeling one’s life on President Obama’s life is not really viable for many if not most black American men (Hoston 2014). This suggests that Obama’s political autobiography does not then serve as a primer of any kind; what it offers is not a “how to” reach for political and social success. Philip Holden notes in Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State that “Autobiography is ‘a constituitive act, one designed to construct a reality about a life in a place or time …” (Holden 2008, 44). Additionally, autobiography is “a socially symbolic act concerned with establishing the relationship of an individual subject and a larger community or series of communities. [Thus] …all autobiographies, by definition, participate in … selfmaking …” (Mangcu 2014, 162). To say that the autobiography constructs a “reality” about a life demonstrates a certain naïveté about the relationship between fiction and language, just 272

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as the now infamous rhetoric of denying blue and red states, and seeing only “united states”—however much we like to hear it—does not make it so. Hence Derrida’s observation that the kind of fictions and violations produced the moment that some sovereignty is claimed and named has an analogy: “… autographic violence and fiction are to be found at work as much in what one calls the individual autobiography as in the ‘historical’ origin of states” (Derrida 2014, 14). Thomas Couser’s essay “Filiation: Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father” questions the production of a climactic section in the autobiography. The scene of Obama’s trip to Kenya, when Obama hears the story of his origins is, Couser insists, “conveyed, implausibly”: as one long speech—almost thirty printed pages (or approximately 8,000 words)— with only short interjections or interruptions. Obama may have tape-recorded the original story and edited into its seamless shape, but no account is given of the process by which it moves from oral narrative to the printed page.18 What concerns Couser is the manner in which the “single-sourced story is inserted whole into the larger narrative as if simultaneously heard, memorized, and accepted as authoritative” (Couser 2012, 12). That the text mimics other genres at this point, the “folk genealogy” or perhaps more significantly, hints at a Biblical tone, is more interesting: First there was Miwiru. It’s not known who came before. Miwiru sired Sigoma, Sigoma sired Owiny, Owiny sired Kisodhi, Kisodhi sired Ogelo, Ogelo sired Otondi, Otondi sired Obongo, Obongo sired Okoth, and Okoth sired Opiyo. (Obama 1995, 394) It is important to ask what kind of absence this almost biblical “celebration … of … beginnings” (to repeat Derrida’s phrasing) performatively erases through the work of this genealogical archive. In a June 2011 interview, Toni Morrison observed: …so much of our history has been erased, distorted and reconstructed to a level of fantasy. It’s as though avoiding the truths of the past is somehow so degrading that no one can function. But I think clarity about the past plays a very important role in how we handle the present and what we might be able to do for the future. But if a human being doesn’t know what happened to himself or his parents, he will never be able to cope with the current situation or the future. (quoted in Noudelmann 2012, 37) The question here is whether or not that information has to be specific to oneself. Can the political autobiography that offers a community a narrative of origins, an imagined genealogy, work to unify or reconcile that community where historical conditions are such that a similar family genealogy is for almost everyone “the impossible”—on the level of “the unforgiveable”; where an inheritance of slavery is the condition of having had erased the historical origins of millions, followed by millions more, in each generation? This scene in Obama’s autobiography works like a wish fulfillment that vicariously takes its readers on a trip to a time and place that can never, for generations of Americans, in reality be had. What Couser tries to suggest but does not claim directly is the strong possibility that the story of how “Miwiru sired Sigoma” is also, of course, a fictionalization, also a forgetting. 273

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Whatever feelings of social isolation and loneliness, of fragmented identity and weariness in the face of unrelenting racialization that the young Barack Obama endures as a college student whether in California or in New York or even as an organizer in Chicago, here, in these moments—in this gathering of 8,000 or so words—for the sustained length of the narrative, is for all intents and purposes now ameliorated by way of synchrony and logic, the “gathering together” of signs which Derrida notes is part of the archontic power of “unification” and “identification” (Derrida 1995, 3). The scene of Obama weeping at the Partriach’s graveside is made all the more poignant for this apparent inheritance. This Kenyan homecoming signals, of course, another kind of return of the repressed, but as a metaphor for political reconciliation today, it reads as a reunion—a “gathering,” perhaps—that consolidates the past into the future-to-come, that enacts memory while it allows for forgetting, and that suggests a kind of “truth” that hints at reconciliation. Having returned to patriarchal origins, and standing in the place of so many who could never find such a gravesite, the image is powerful not only for Obama, but for millions. As Derrida observes, “being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations” (Derrida 1994, xix).

Imaginative amnesty: Forgiving and forgetting Derrida reminds us in “Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German,” that a nation “is both memory and, in the present, promise, project”—and what Renan finally simplifies as a “‘desire to live together.’” Derrida asks, “Is this promise not in itself, structurally, a relation to the future that involves a forgetting—indeed, a kind of essential indifference to the past, to what in the present is only present—but also a gathering, that is, also a memory of the future?” (Derrida 2008, 294). It is on the basis of this kind of forgetting that, according to Loraux, historians attribute the first example of political amnesty to Athenians in 403 BCE, to a promise to essentially forgive and forget that what precedes the harmonious fraternity of the polis is division itself, conflict, or, more specifically civil war. Sommerstein and Bayliss in their book Oath and State in Ancient Greece reference a recently discovered (in 2001) inscription of such a “reconciliation oath,” which seems representative: “… I will not recall past wrongs, either in word or deed; and I will not put anyone to death, nor punish him with exile, nor deprive him of property, on account of past events; and if anyone does recall past wrongs, I will not permit it…” (Loraux 2006, 142, emphasis added).19 Such a condition of a coerced amnesia may be expedient, but it seems that other oath-like discourses and practices, perhaps like the work of some Truth and Reconciliation commissions, the political autobiography, and the archive, in terms of their mutual after-effect of allowing to forget, one may argue, appear to function as essential components of the nation, and thus seem to foster “the desire to live together” (Renan, quoted in Derrida 2008, 294). Can forgetting ever be just, even when justified? It may be “natural” as Sigmund Freud makes clear, but is it also always politically expedient? In his essay “The Laws of Reflection,” the unusual circumstances of Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment is gently referred to by Derrida when he asks, or “leaves open” the question of how Mandela’s own admiration for the ideals of democracy led him to refuse government offers of “conditional liberty.” It is a question that asks us to reflect on what appears to be the case: “Did he let himself be imprisoned?” Derrida asks. “Did he make himself a prisoner?” (Derrida 2014, 85). These rarely asked questions indicate the kind of forgetting that occurs, for example, when the readers collectively “forget” that Mandela was, in a way, voluntarily imprisoned, even though this truth is easily accessible to readers in other formats—a Google search, for example—and even though this truth is suggested and mentioned briefly in Long 274

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Walk to Freedom itself. On the one hand, it makes Mandela even more of a noble figure, but on the other hand, it complicates what is often repeated as a simple fact—“He was imprisoned for twenty-seven years”—because that imprisonment was concurrently punishment and protest, simultaneously readable as powerlessness and a powerful act of resistance, and yet, the Mandela Foundation website’s “prison timeline” did not, until 2015, make mention of Mandela rejecting offers of conditional release.20 What has that particular archive been up to? These questions and others remind us of the fact that despite reading the autobiography or despite carefully watching his story as it unfolded, we still would not “know” Mandela, thus in discussing Mandela, Derrida hints at the messianic: “Who is it? Who is coming?” Derrida’s reminder here is that identity is not known even in its time; figures, especially political figures, come to mean something else in the future-to-come. They come to be understood in a different way, take on new symbolisms, and become a part of ideas that live past them. Bearing the responsibility to tell the full story, however, defining Mandela as the man who spent twenty-seven years in prison, who went on to become President, and the person who “taught the world to forgive” is an intolerable reduction of the complexity of his experiences; the political auto-biography might also serve as a point of erasure of the experiences of others, as Mangcu hints. In other words, a master narrative. South African writer and anti-Apartheid activist Breyten Breytenbach does not let this representation of Mandela sit. In a letter nothing short of scathing, entitled, “Mandela’s Smile” (a corollary might be “Obama’s Smile”) Breytenbach accuses Mandela of everything from selling out (“Not for nothing your nickname, ‘Moneydeala’! … Your aura is for sale”), to ignoring the plight of children in favor of attending to the parade of visits from the world’s celebrities and ex-politicians (“some exotic teddy bear to be slobbered over”), to his giving the revolution away (“Was the possible alternative—socialist redistribution—too horrible to contemplate? Too horrible for whom?”). Despite the overwhelmingly bitter tone of the letter, it’s also clear that Breytenbach is looking to the future: “To survive, we must assume the responsibility of imagining the world differently.”21 Though of course striking a very different chord, Derrida offers a cautionary warning about the nature of the image inside the system: We have looked at him through words that are sometimes instruments of observation, that can become such, in any case, if we don’t keep guard against it. What we have described, in trying precisely to escape from speculation, was a sort of grand historical watchtower. But nothing permits one to take for granted the unity, and even less the legitimacy, of this optic of reflection, of its singular laws, of the Law, of its place of institution, presentation, or revelation, what one gathers too quickly, for example, under the name of the West. But this presumption of unity—does it not produce something like an effect … that so many forces try to appropriate, always, an effect that is visible and invisible, like a mirror, and hard, like the walls of a prison? Everything that still hides Nelson Mandela from us. 22 Thus writing before Mandela was released and speaking on another day upon which Mandela refused the government’s offer of a partial release, Derrida suggests that it is not just the walls of the prison that hide Mandela from us. The question may be, what doesn’t conceal him? If political autobiography constructs as much as it reveals, if it reveals anything, what “is being made in order to hide it”?23

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“One could never,” Derrida claims, “in the ordinary sense of the words, found a politics or law on forgiveness” (Derrida 2001, 38). There are no laws of forgiveness, but if we wanted to know, say, where forgiveness comes from, it must be, Derrida says, from the unforgiveable itself. If there were a logic, it seems clear that forgiveness, (“if there is forgiveness”) would have to come out of whatever was unforgiveable. For, as Derrida makes plain, one can only forgive that which is unforgiveable. In other words, it is not really forgiveness if one is dealing with what we might call a wrong, or an error in judgment that has to be righted by some reparation, or if a third party, embodied, say, as the law—the juridical apparatus— intervenes and negotiates a reconciliation or amnesty. For Derrida, the characteristic of forgiving the unforgiveable is that it remains, indeed, that must reside, outside the law itself. As is well known, a “right” to forgiveness doesn’t exist, even if, one day, there’s a universal human right to forget.24 Atonements, giving back, making up for, amnesties, or any of these dynamics produce an imaginative condition, a fiction of reconciliation, an agreement that the aggrievement will be resolved through understanding or an understanding all the while knowing that there is no real way to level the field. Though it was commonly held that the election of Barack Obama to the office of the President would in another way give something back—dignity, authority, legitimacy—to black America that had been taken away a long, long time ago, in the form of generational debts that need to be paid, there’s barely a question here about whether or not this can ever be done, whether on a small or on a historic scale such as that of the case of slavery, oppression, and a nation built on racism. What’s done is done. Interestingly, Obama’s “No Victor No Vanquished” rhetoric25 seems to make a virtue of historical necessity. In fact, it might be the case that these structures also produce or enact a kind of forgetting akin to that of the archive or of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission: the conflict has been had, the material is gathered so that it can be forgotten, handed over, let go. Except for the fact that it’s not. The victors as well as the vanquished know this well. This may be another fiction in camouflage like “Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states. We are, and always will be, the United States of America.”26 Such reconciliation of opposites is desirable, such rhetoric is powerful, such a gathering, however, fictionalizes a reality that in fact has polarized the U.S.A. in the twenty-first century. As Derrida observes, “[t]here is always a strategical or political calculation in the generous gesture of one who offers reconciliation or amnesty, and it is necessary always to integrate this calculation in our analyses” (Derrida 2001, 40).

Forgotten but not gone: Hauntology After reading a post on social media in 2012, written in response to yet another “not guilty” verdict in a trial about the murder of an unarmed black youth in the US, Patrisse Cullers’ response was visceral: “‘The three words, “Black Lives Matter” hit me in the gut,’ she remembers. ‘I put a hashtag on it because it just felt so necessary to archive it.’”27 For Cullers, a black American activist, the narrative of racism is both personal and national—her hashtag, however, has “gone global” according to an interview Cullers gave in 2015 to Michel Martin of National Public Radio. The goal of developing a “new narrative” for black Americans, she says, is both “awe-inspiring and it’s also a lot of responsibility.” Perhaps an indication of a shift away from exceptionalist figures, #BlackLivesMatter is a leaderless movement: “It’s important to us in the BlackLivesMatter movement that … we’re not following an individual… This is a leader-full movement.” 276

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Drawing a comparison between Obama and Mandela in 2008, Breytenbach observed that Mandela says that his major political work was done upon himself while he was in prison all those years. How to move from, say a nationalist leader to a national leader, how to move from a historical revenge to reconciliation, to nation-building, these were not easy things. And I think, in some ways, it has to do with constructing one’s own identity. It has to do with constructing one’s own ethical guidelines. And I think this is what Mandela did, and I think this is what Obama has done also. But they come to power carried on a huge wave of popular expectation. You know, what I find painful at the moment […] seems to be a kind of a discarding of what this national mandate actually means that brought Obama to power here. When one sees the way the new administration is being constructed, it seems like Washington is just continuing the way it always has.28 Indeed, two administrations later, the complaint that Barack Obama has not fundamentally improved the lives of black Americans is a familiar one. And figures from Toni Morrison to the average black American on the street will state clearly that the United States is far from post-racial, something that the racialized politics of the Trump administration has since exploited. The #BlackLivesMatter Movement—a movement generated by three “queer Black women”29—suggests that a grass-roots, anti-establishment approach is making a comeback, but in a different form, for whatever does return, returns, but always already as something different. #BlackLivesMatter it might not be surprising to learn will predictably find its way back to Africa at large, and to South Africa, as it is already in Ghana and Canada. It’s the return of the repressed, but yet there is something very significant that happens when something is forgotten, when we allow ourselves to forget or when, not as a matter of choice, our amnesia is organized for us under the guise of celebratory beginnings (again) and under the spell of the leader-heroes of change. The biopolitics that is intrinsic to institutionalized and state racism, to what Michelle Alexander calls the New Jim Crow, is another apartheid—with a difference.30 What Derrida once read as “racism’s last word”—“Apartheid”—as studied and discussed and analysed and witnessed and experienced and archived as it has been, no doubt has its specter, and that specter is transnational. And yet Mandela and Obama’s embodiment of their respective national narrative is peculiar in so far as they do change the national story—thus symbolic of the past and concurrently of the future-to-come, their affirmation of progress is a “promise” that the nation’s story will be different while it both affirms the past and affirms the different future. The effect of this is a compelling force akin to the power of transformation often attributed to forgiveness that affects both the victim and the perpetrator. As Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition has observed, what forgiveness does is to stop the indefinite ongoing existence of the unforgiveable. It serves as a limit. It intervenes. Perhaps, it brings an end: what today we commonly call “closure.” However, Derrida parts company with Arendt here. Derrida’s reading of Freud suggests why the issues are never fully resolved, why they are not fully nor finally forgotten, why the archive is never closed and the future is always haunted. Alongside this ontology, there is always “hauntology”: If I am … to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice … . No justice— 277

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let us not say no law and once again we are not speaking here of laws—seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism.31 The presence of technologies of memory—from Freud’s mystic writing pad to Google— point to the limit of our memories, perhaps a natural limit which we attempt to supplement or subvert with the work of the archival gesture. We record the past—the right documents, the right artifacts—in order to survive, to save the past from the forgetfulness of the future. As far as the political future is concerned, however, we would do well to remember that ghosts do not disappear, they appear.

Notes 1 Paul Lanois traces the “right to be forgotten” to the EU’s commitment to the right to privacy, dating before Vice-President of the European Commission Viviane Reding’s 2012 speech introducing the concept, back to 1995 and the establishment of the EU Data Protection Directive. See Lanois (2014). Additionally, as of January 1, 2015, individuals under the age of 18 in the state of California also maintain this right: The most noteworthy aspect of S.B. 568 is the “right to be forgotten” clause in the context of minors. Essentially, this means that a California resident who is under 18 years of age now has the ability to have the online content that is collected and stored about them by an online service company to be permanently deleted. In fact, the website owner must actually disclose to minors that they indeed have this right and they must be educated about the actual process to make such a request when desired.

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See McDevitt (2015). A version of “Laws of Forgiveness: Mandela, Obama, Derrida” was originally delivered at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenburg University, Mainz, Germany and was subsequently published in Obama and Transnational American Studies (Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg, 2016), edited by Alfred Hornung. Mandela’s autobiography was published in 1994 and Obama’s in 1995, as was Derrida’s Mal d’archive. The academic interest in this problem can be demonstrated in two important collections featuring transnational studies of autobiography, politics, and mediation, a growing interest in the first decade of the twenty-first century: Auto/Biography and Mediation (2010), edited by Alfred Hornung; and a special issue of the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly (Winter 2010), edited by Sidonie Smith. The metaphor of the fever can be read in several ways; however, it is important to note that at a 1998 conference in South Africa, the transcript of which is reprinted in Refiguring the Archive (Hamilton et al. 2002), Derrida offered this re-emphasis on the role of the death drive in his definition: “And it is because this radical drive to destruction is always at work … that the desire for archive is a burning one” (Hamilton 2002, 44). See Sommerstein and Bayliss (2013) for historical background on archons and their responsibilities in Athens; see chapter: “High Officials: Archons and Generals.” Abdulrazak Imam, with reference to A. Sparks, reminds us that “Mandela obtained the plans of the [prison] cottage and ‘had an exact replica built as his holiday home at Qunu, his birthplace at Transkei …’”(121). Significantly, the cottage was the site where, according to Imam, Mandela was given to feel as if he were the one hosting political negotiations with the South African government. Nelson Mandela donated his first house to the Soweto Heritage Trust in 1997. “The Mandela House strives to be a world-class visitor attraction, and a leading centre for the preservation, presentation, and research of the history, heritage and legacy of the Mandela Family” (www.mandelahouse.com).

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Obama, Mandela, Derrida 8 This point should not be lost on readers of Dreams from My Father who might question how Obama’s absent father became the center of his life story, which was so obviously shaped by the presence of his mother. The genre of the political autobiography seems to be patriarchal through and through, even or especially when the father is a “legal fiction.” 9 Reports regarding xenophobic attacks in South Africa as recently as April 2015 have been widely publicized as a new phenomenon though critics assert that violence of all kinds and economic inequality have been steadily growing in South Africa post-Apartheid. See Breytenbach (2008a, 2008b). 10 Respectively, headlines from The New York Times (U.S.A.), The Sun News (Nigeria); Belfast Telegraph (Northern Ireland); Sunday Tribune (South Africa). Notable pieces, such as that written by President of Ghana John Dramani Mahama in The New York Times were reprinted and reposted globally. 11 Mark Sanders’ Ambiguities of Witnessing offers a valuable chapter on this issue as it relates to culture, language, and translation—especially of the word “xolela” (Sanders 2007) 12 Derrida emphasizes the ways in which Mandela’s Rivonia trial is marked by his consistent reference to himself and his people, “we,” “us,” and so forth. He is a “reflection” of who they are and vice versa. In reference to Mandela’s defense: “The ‘I’ of this autobiography founds itself and justifies itself, reasons and signs in the name of ‘we.’ He always says ‘my people’…” (Derrida 2014, 73). 13 Mark Sanders’ Ambiguities of Witnessing is a very important study of this subject and something I have yet to fully absorb. An analysis that includes a discussion of his valuable work is something I look forward to pursuing in a longer version of this essay (Sanders 2007). 14 A term developed by Peter Novick in his The Holocaust in American Life (Novick 1999, 13). 15 There are, of course, other sources and archives in place either in South Africa or around the world. For example, “The South African History Archive (SAHA) is an independent human rights archive dedicated to documenting, supporting, and promoting greater awareness of past and contemporary struggles for justice through archival practices and outreach, and the utilisation of access to information laws,” and As of 2015, SAHA has launched a cross-programmatic pilot project, the Right to Truth (RTT) project, to consolidate SAHA’s archival practice and information activism that has been focused on making the work and records of, and surrounding, the South African TRC more readily accessible. (www.saha.org.za) 16 From Argentina to, most recently, Canada (2015) and Tunisia (2014), at least 30 nations have initiated an investigative commission to address government violations of human rights. 17 In a different context, Derrida attends to this in “Otobiographies,” citing Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “State? What is that? Well, then, open your ears to me. For now I shall speak to you about the death of peoples. State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: ‘I, the State, am the people.’ That is a lie!” (Derrida 1985, 34). 18 Page 12, all Couser quotes are cited from the version of his essay posted on his Academia.edu page, see bibliography; for the version published in the journal Life Writing, see Couser (2012). 19 Sommerstein and Bayliss make the distinction that direct threats to democracy were the subjects of different oaths: “I will kill by word and by deed and by vote and by my own hand, if I am able, anyone who overthrows the democracy at Athens …” (Sommerstein and Bayliss 2013, 131). 20 Since delivering a version of this essay as a lecture in Germany in October 2014, wherein I made this observation, the Mandela Foundation website appears to have been much improved—redesigned and revised in 2015 to include the 1985 offer of conditional release from Botha. There should also be clear reference to earlier offers of release to his Transkei homelands, which were, obviously, also rejected. 21 Breyten Breytenbach, “Mandela’s Smile: Notes on South Africa’s ‘Failed Revolution,’” Harpers, Dec. 2008. 22 This translation of Derrida’s essay, published in 2014 in the journal Law & Literature (26.1) by Charles Gelman offers a change in the last line. The translation published in Psyche Volume II by Caws and Lorenz reads “hides Mandela from our sight.” 23 Although it is not exactly in line with my thesis here, Cheryl-Ann Michael makes a point about what political autobiography makes disappear: “In political autobiographies … what is presented is an illusion of a linear development of political consciousness which cloaks an erasure of differences between past selves and the present ‘I’”(Michael 2013[1995], 74).

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Nina Morgan 24 A week prior to presenting this paper in Mainz at Johannes Gutenberg University in October 2014, I was sitting in a little university room in Atlanta where I live, having an animated conversation with former Defense Minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg, who is said to have plagiarized hundreds of pages of his PhD dissertation. Mr. zu Guttenberg had come to Kennesaw State University to introduce Mr. Jared Cohen, his friend and Director of Google Ideas; now, there are a great many things that zu Guttenberg might have wanted Google to erase or to help him and others forget, but unfortunately for him, the Google Spain case’s right to forget or right to erase doesn’t extend to public figures. In our meeting, I asked Mr. zu Guttenberg what he’d learned about forgiveness as a result of his experiences. He said, quite convincingly, that he learned “First of all, not to expect it.” No doubt Derrida would strongly agree with this statement as he tells us that forgiveness—if there is forgiveness—“comes as a surprise.” 25 “Obama on the World: President Obama talks to Thomas L. Friedman about Iraq, Putin and Israel.” The New York Times August 8, 2014. http://nyti.ms/1vnTGVb. 26 This sentence is taken from President Obama’s 2008 victory speech, but versions of it can be heard from 2004 Democratic Convention speech onward. 27 Interview by Michel Martin. “The #BlackLivesMatter Movement: Marches and Tweeting for Healing” on National Public Radio. See Cullers (2015). 28 Interview with Amy Goodman of the independent American news program, “Democracy Now!”. 29 For a “herstory” of this movement, see their webpage: blacklivesmatter.com/a-herstory-of-the-blacklivesmatter-movement/ 30 Ashley Dawson’s work on “water apartheid” in Cape Town, South Africa today is an example of how such divisions return in different forms. 31 Page xix. For a full examination of this concept, see Derrida’s Specters of Marx (Derrida 1994).

Bibliography Breytenbach, Breyten. “Poet and Anti-Apartheid Activist Breyten Breytenbach on South Africa’s ‘Failed Revolution.’” Interview by Amy Goodman. Democracy Now, November 26, 2008a. Breytenbach, Breyten. “Mandela’s Smile: Notes on South Africa’s ‘Failed Revolution.’” Harpers, December 2008b. Couser, G.Thomas. “Filiation in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father.” Life Writing 9. 3 (2012): 259– 267. Couser, Thomas G. “Filiation in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father.” http://www.academia.edu/ 8332200/Filiation_in_Barack_Obamas_Dreams_from_My_Father. Cullers, Patrisse. “The #BlackLivesMatter Movement: Marches and Tweeting for Healing.” Interview by Michel Martin. Morning Edition June 9, 2015. Derrida, Jacques. “Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name.” Trans. Avital Ronell. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Ed. Christie McDonald. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. 3–38. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. “On Forgiveness.” On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. 25–60. Derrida, Jacques. “Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German.” Psyche: Inventions of the Other. Eds. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Vol. II. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. 241–298. Derrida, Jacques. “Admiration of Nelson Mandela, or The Laws of Reflection.” Trans. Charles Gelman. Law and Literature 26. 1 (2014): 9–30. Derrida, Jacques. “Racism’s Last Word.” Psyche: Inventions of the Other. Eds. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Vol. I. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. 377–386. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Duncan, Norman, et al. “Living Through the Legacy: the Apartheid Archive Project and the Possibilities for Psychosocial Transformation.” South African Journal of Psychology 44. 3 (2014): 282–291. Hamilton, Carolyn, et al. Refiguring the Archive. Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip, 2002. Holden, Philip. Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.

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Obama, Mandela, Derrida Hoston, Willam T. Black Masculinity in the Obama Era: Outliers of Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Imam, Abdulrazak. “The Shaping of a Saint-President: Latent Clues from Nelson Mandela’s Autobiography.” Behavior and Social Issues 18 (2009): 99–135. Lanois, Paul. “Time to Forget: EU Privacy Rules and the Right to Request the Deletion of Data on the Internet.” Journal of Internet Law 18. 4 (2014): 20–27. Loraux, Nicole . The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens. Trans. Corinne Pache and Jeff Fort. New York: Zone Books, 2006. Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Boston: Back Bay, 1995. Mangcu, Xolela. “The Power of Memory Against Forgetting.” New African 543 (October 2014): 54–60. McDevitt, Andrew. “California Leads the Way on Children’s Privacy Protection Law.” Truste Blog. Michael, Cheryl-Ann. “Gender and Iconography in Auto/biographies of Nelson and Winnie Mandela.” The Uses of Autobiography. Ed. Julia Swindells. Oxford: Routledge, 2013[1995]. 73–81. Noudelmann, Francois. “Interview with Toni Morrison.” Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire 12. 1 (2012): 36–43. Literature Resource Center. Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life. New York: Mariner Books, 1999. Obama, Barack. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. New York: Random House, 1995. Sanders, Mark. Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2007. Schaffer, Kay, and Sidonie Smith. “Intimacies of Power: Mediating Victim, Perpetrator, and Beneficiary Positions after the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” Auto/Biography and Mediation. Ed. Alfred Hornung. Heidelberg: Winter, 2010. 33–49. Sheringham, Michael. “Memory and the Archive in Contemporary Life-writing.” French Studies 59. 1 (2005): 47–53. Sommerstein, Alan H., and Andrew J. Bayliss. Oath and State in Ancient Greece. Berlin and Boston: Walter De Gruyter GmbH, 2013. South African History Archive. n.p., 1988. saha.org.za. The New York Times. “Obama on the World: President Obama talks to Thomas L. Friedman about Iraq, Putin and Israel.” August 8, 2014. Wieviorka, Annette. The Era of the Witness. Trans. Jared Stark. New York: Cornell University Press, 2006.

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23 VISUAL INTERTEXTUALITY AND TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES Revisiting American exceptionalism Rob Kroes

Introduction From the 1990s onwards, the urge began to be felt to break out of a conceptual view of America as sui generis, as “exceptional,” as different in its historical experience and destiny than any other country or nation in the world. Surely, the sense of American difference had been around for much longer, and had in fact inspired explorations of the many ways in which America had proved different than other countries, though not exceptional. The best encyclopedic treatment is Seymour Martin Lipset’s American Exceptionalism (Lipset 1997). A comparativist, Lipset looked at a number of areas in political and social life where America traditionally had been seen as forming an exception to rules prevalent in Europe. Thus he revisited Tocqueville’s aperçus concerning the lasting effects of America’s special historical genesis and development, and the German early twentieth-century historian and sociologist Werner Sombart’s (1906) classic study Why is There no Socialism in the United States? on the question of why there is no socialism in the United States. They are all areas where America can be seen to offer counterpoints to European history while in other areas it moved in step with European history. Thus America could be woven into a larger narrative of forces of social change and modernization as these affected nations on both sides of the Atlantic, each with its own peculiar quirks and twists. Yet exceptionalism—in its more demanding, exclusivist reading—is a different animal and it has taken more than a little pushing to shatter its hold on American historiography and on the American sense of identity. In an influential essay, entitled “Exceptionalism,” Daniel Rodgers (1998) made the point that from the early modern era to the postcolonial present, the cultivation of sentiments of difference and superiority has been at the heart of the project of nation-state formation. Within these common terms, however, there has run a thread, which, if not wholly distinct to the American complex, carries a peculiarly striking weight. That is the idea of exceptionalism. Rodgers then makes the following simple, but crucial point: Exceptionalism differs from difference. Difference requires contrast; exceptionalism requires a rule. Exceptionalist 282

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claims pin one’s own nation’s distinctiveness to every other people’s sameness—to general laws and conditions governing everything but the special case at hand. When difference is put in exceptionalist terms, the exception becomes an exemption, an exemption from the universal tendencies of history, the “normal” fate of nations, the laws of historical mechanics itself (Rodgers 1998, 22–23). It is implications like these, where a nation can claim to be above the general rule, if not above the law, that have inspired America’s political action as much as its self-reflection. Listen to Obama, in 2008: We have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional. Now, the fact that I am very proud of my country and I think that we’ve got a whole lot to offer the world does not lessen my interest in recognizing the value and wonderful qualities of other countries, or recognizing that we’re not always going to be right, or that other people may have good ideas, or that in order for us to work collectively, all parties have to compromise and that includes us. I see no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that leadership is incumbent, depends on, our ability to create partnerships because we can’t solve these problems alone. (quoted in Sullivan 2010) In the monitoring eyes of the Right, qualifying words like “though imperfect,” or the call for compromise, while acknowledging that “other people may have good ideas,” may already be far too subtle and nuanced. But what caused it to rise in howling anger were Obama’s opening words – often the only words quoted in the Right’s indictment: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” As right-wing commentator Michael Barone thundered: “One cannot imagine Presidents Roosevelt, Truman or Kennedy, Eisenhower or Reagan, uttering such sentiments” (quoted in Sullivan 2010). Up against such odds, a man like Obama, politician and intellectual, had to tack to the political winds while keeping an eye on the compass of his convictions. He has kept valiantly trying to add a touch of realism and relativism to the idea of American exceptionalism, much as that very endeavor is an abomination in the eyes of the Tea Party or Alt-Right watchdogs. To those with a historian’s memory, however, it may even appear as if Obama was trying to add an almost European sense of the fallibility and frailty of human exploits to counter the more impetuous uses of exceptionalism in American political discourse. I for one could not help being reminded of C. Vann Woodward’s reading of the historical experience of the American post-Civil War South as the only region in the United States to have experienced defeat and loss and to have developed a quasi-European sense of the tragic (Woodward 1993, 1964). Some of that sobering sense, I feel, is what President Obama struggled to convey to a larger American public. Obama may have quickly learned his lesson, paying tribute, if not lip service, to a word that only relatively recently had gained currency in American political discourse. The role it played, though, was like that of earlier passwords like Americanism and anti-Communism, as in the days of the Red Scare following World War I, or in the early years of the Cold War with McCarthyism in the role of monitor and protector of the purity of the body politic. 283

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The monitoring gaze today comes once again from the political Right, embodied in its lunatic fringe of the Tea Party. In a nationally televised speech on Syria, on Tuesday night, September 10, 2013, Obama turned to American exceptionalism as a rallying cry in his endeavor to unite his country behind him. “America is not the world’s policeman. Terrible things happen across the globe, and it is beyond our means to right every wrong,” Obama said. “ But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death, and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act.” He added: “That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional.” The concluding word must have brought a wry smile to some at least among his listeners. They must have recognized its use not as powerful rhetoric, to clinch the argument, but rather as formulaic, as a shibboleth granting safe passage to a man whose political credentials had never been fully accepted by a vengeful part of the American citizenry. The word exceptional had become the litmus test to those in the media and the political arena who were out to de-construct and undermine the president from the moment he had entered office. Yet it would be wrong to see Obama as merely paying lip service to the word exceptionalism and all it stands for in summary of a larger American creed. Many have been the occasions, from his early presidency on, where we can see Obama revisiting the concept, not just to pay tribute and be done with it, but to consider the options it gave him to be an educator of the nation, to bring a degree of subtlety, nuance, and complexity to a word that too often was used as a facile trope. The way Obama used the word was very much in the vein of what Sacvan Bercovitch has called the American Jeremiad, a use of public speech that reminds the audience of its high calling while pointing to the many ways in which it is still remiss, falling short. It does so, rhetorically, by contrasting an image of exceptional destiny with the many sordid faces of every-day reality. It argues, so to speak, through a technique of visual counterpoint, moving back and forth between images as these pop up before our inner eyes through a process of association while measuring them by a visual yard-stick of the normal or proper. My discussion of American exceptionalism brings out this process more clearly. Letting ourselves be guided by the flow of mental intertexts an alleged American exceptionalism gives way to transnationalism, in much the same way that in palimpsests surface texts and images cover what went before, yet never quite erasing what lies submerged beneath them.

Intertextuality and transnationalism My recent book, Prison Area, Independence Valley: American Paradoxes in Political Life and Popular Culture (Kroes 2015), revisits the concept of exceptionalism and argues on behalf of a version of methodological transnationalism. It does so by revisiting the process that had unconsciously guided my hand when I wrote the book, a process that one might call mental intertextuality: whatever the precise topic, be it the history of the freak show and public spectacle, or the trajectory of atrocity photographs, such as Holocaust images, in my mind one image under discussion evoked related images, thematically related yet originating in different geographical and historical settings. Thus, through mental intertextuality, an argument could evolve that naturally transcended geographic, historical, and cultural borders, freely ranging in a trans-Atlantic space. The outcome was unintentional, yet undeniably transnational. In my life as an academic active in American Studies at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, one continuing theme has been my study of the many ways in which American and European cultures have cross-pollinated and the ways in which cultural 284

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influences were received or resisted. Part of my interest was in issues of Americanization of European cultures or of European anti-Americanism, on either political or cultural grounds. Some chapters in my latest book clearly reflect that interest, while also critically revisiting it. If issues of empire and imperial sway show up in my writing there, it is clearly in response to wider intellectual concerns in the post-9/11 study of America. Issues of politics and power have forced themselves upon my mind most directly in the opening and concluding chapters of the book, on the George W. Bush administration first, on the Obama administration later. In my earlier writing on American popular culture in particular I tried to answer questions as to what accounts for the lure and appeal of American popular culture, at home and abroad. In my new book, though, I found that my interest had moved to the darker side of popular culture and forms of spectacle and entertainment, even in such gruesome varieties as lynchings. I also found, more clearly than ever before, that there are forms of transnationalism inherent to the train of thought of the human mind. Addressing spectacles and parades as forms of public entertainment, I noticed my mind wandering from circus and side-show artists parading through American small town Main Streets, to dignified Jewish citizens being forcibly paraded through German cities on the day following Kristallnacht (the night of the shattered glass) to the merriment of German onlookers, and back from there to the many photographs of public lynchings in the American South, with jolly and grimacing bystanders posing for the camera. The most notorious among this latter corpus are photographs to do with the Ku Klux Klan. After a long spell of quiescence, it re-emerged into national prominence in the 1920s, reaching an all-time peak membership in 1924—a year, incidentally, that saw the dedication of various Confederate memorials, including the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, whose planned removal was the pretext for the “Unite the Right” —also: “They will not replace us” rally there in August 2017. It brought American fascists back in the streets, marching under the banner of a virulent nativism, of a vicious fear of being removed from the pedestal of their proper place in society. It also brought to the minds of people watching these images on TV older visual repertoires dating back to NaziGermany, fascist Italy, and similar racist clashes elsewhere. In such a stream of consciousness, such a chain of visual recollections, national settings—American or otherwise —are transcended. The wandering—and wondering—mind of the observer moves in a space naturally transnational. Nor is it always only a matter—and I wish to emphasize this—of a process of visual associations forcing itself upon my mind. Following the same logic, the train of associations can also be linguistic, where an argument applying to one historical situation calls forth similar arguments applying to different situations. Thus, following my exploration of associated visual images of the American South and 1930s’ Nazi Germany, a book came to my mind—which I had read as a student and had been deeply impressed by—written by Kurt Baschwitz (1938), a German Jew who had fled from Nazi Germany to the Netherlands. From his new refuge he became aware of the historical parallels between mob behavior in Germany and the American South and the logic behind it. In what would become a classic study in mass psychology, published in exile in Amsterdam, the author saw his analysis of processes of mob behavior confirmed in both settings, in an amazing act of creating intellectual distance to current events even as they had such immediate dramatic relevance to his own life (Baschwitz 1938, Chapter 18). What I am trying to convey, is that the transnationalism that one can see happening here, is almost like a chimera, with one image shimmering through another one, as if in a palimpsest. History does form palimpsests, covering one layer of images with later ones, as if 285

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on the wall of an old house with one painted advertisement not quite covering a preceding one. It is an uncanny experience when, by looking intently at one image, another one shows up in one’s mind, shimmering through, taking you from one locale and time to another. It is also an exhilarating experience, a sense of being literally transported in an exercise of transnationalism.

Cultural and transnational turns American Studies scholars had begun to move in new directions following what was commonly referred to as “the cultural turn.” It was just one of the fashionable turns their intellectual community had collectively taken in recent years, turns such as the linguistic turn, the visual turn, the transnational turn. It had left some people wandering how many turns it takes before the wheel is reinvented. For indeed, what seemed like a paradigm shift under the banner of the cultural turn, from a larger intellectual perspective may well be seen not as a new turn, but a return to the wisdoms of the old Chicago School in the social sciences, and its revolutionary sense of “the social construction of reality,” to quote a book title that managed to sum up the entire intellectual program underlying what we now know as “constructivism” (Berger and Luckmann 1966). Whatever the case, adherents of the New American Studies set upon the “de-construction” of their own academic field with a vengeance. At times their efforts showed a vehemence as if the issue was a matter of exorcism, of driving out all the evil connotations of the word “America,” in an act of linguistic voluntarism, as if changing the language one used would change the world. It led one outsider to scathingly speak of Anti-American Studies, in a facetious review in the New Republic of three examples of the new post-exceptionalist American Studies.1 It was not long, though, before sobering second thoughts came to some of the leading “New Americanists.” In a piece, entitled “Re-thinking ‘American Studies after US Exceptionalism,’” Donald Pease acknowledged the resistance to change of large swathes of reality. Transnational American Studies aspired to remediate the discourse of US exceptionalism by transnationalizing the core values of American civil society. But global civil society has neither transcended the era of the nation-state nor entered into the utopian realm of a cosmopolitan democracy. Have not scholars in transnational American studies overestimated the ways in which global civil society can mobilize the political energies needed to remedy the economic inequalities that globalization has engendered? Has not post-exceptionalist American studies also ignored the US state’s power to describe the US as a permanent state of exception? (Pease 2009, 22) There is a remarkable return here, linked undoubtedly to the aftermath of 9/11 and the American display of what is known among military people as “full spectrum dominance,” to age-old concepts like the state and the state’s power, or for that matter the nation-state and its attendant nationalism. If the point is to confront transnationalism and exceptionalism, one obvious first step would be to zoom out from any particular instance of exceptionalism and to see it as just one case among many others. This is precisely what Obama did, conceiving of American exceptionalism as a specific case within the larger category—the larger genus—of national exceptionalisms. Hovering above the fray, in the manner of the true transnational mind, he 286

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showed American exceptionalism its place. The vehemence of the reaction to this perspective clearly affirmed the alternative reading of American exceptionalism as purely sui generis, as being one of a kind. This is what Rodgers made clear in his revisit of the concept of exceptionalism. In this extreme version American exceptionalism stands in logical opposition to transnationalism. It turns from an analytic and relativistic perspective into a national ideology, no longer open to disinterested discussion and intellectual debate. It becomes a password—a shibboleth—in the heated national debate setting insiders apart from outsiders. As such it is only the latest stage in a national pastime as old as the American nation, at whatever stage of its historical formation. Transnationalism, then, sketched here as an introspective thought process, as a flow of images associating, appears as an unlikely contender for national self-reflection in the United States at its present, insurgent stage. It is too relativistic, too ironic, to sustain and reflect the current national mood. For the time being it may well have to pull back inside the walls of academia. It may be a while before the United States finds a president as open-minded, as cosmopolitan, as the one who so recently served two full terms in the White House, from 2008–2016.

Note 1 See Alan Wolfe’s article on “Anti-American Studies” in The New Republic (February 10, 2003). In his piece, Wolfe reviewed Robyn Wiegman and Donald Pease eds., The Futures of American Studies, John Carlos Rowe, The New American Studies, and David Noble, Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism.

Bibliography Baschwitz, Kurt. Du und die Masse: Studien zu einer exakten Massenpsychologie. Amsterdam: Feikema, Carelsen en Co., 1938. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. Berger, P. L., and T. Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966. Kroes, Rob. Prison Area, Independence Valley: American Paradoxes in Political Life and Popular Culture [Published in the Dartmouth series in American Studies: Re-Mapping the Transnational]. Hanover: Dartmouth CP, 2015. Lipset, Seymor Martin. American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997. Noble, David W. Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Pease, Donald. “Rethinking ‘American Studies after US Exceptionalism.’” American Literary History 22. 1 (2009): 19–27. Rodgers, Daniel T. “Exceptionalism.” Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past. Eds. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Rowe, John Carlos. The New American Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Sombart, Werner. Why is There no Socialism in the United States?1906. Ed. with an Introductory Essay C.T. Husbands, Foreword Michael Harrington. White Plains: M.E. Sharpe, 1976. Sullivan, Andrew. “The Big Lie.” The Atlantic November 9, 2010. Wiegman, Robyn, and Donald E. Pease, eds., The Futures of American Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Wolfe, Alan. “Anti-American Studies.” The New Republic February 10, 2003. Woodward, C. Vann. The Burden of Southern History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993. Woodward, C. Vann. American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1964.

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24 POST-TRUTH = POSTNARRATIVE? Reading the narrative liminality of transnational right-wing populism Sebastian M. Herrmann

Introduction On October 23, 2016, The Atlantic’s Rosie Gray tweeted an unsettling video of two American men at the Cleveland Convention Center teaching each other the German word “Lügenpresse” to hurl it at reporters. Part of the scene’s discomfort obviously stems from the history of the word: It dates back to German nationalism of 1914 and soared during Nazi Germany a few decades later (Noack 2016). Part of the discomfort lies in the seemingly effortless transnational compatibility of new populist nationalisms it exemplifies: The word had just recently found new popularity at rallies by PEGIDA, a self-avowedly populist antiimmigration movement by German Islamophobes, where it accompanied physical attacks on reporters. Translating to the “lying press,” the term throws into relief the extent to which this new populism, on both sides of the Atlantic, is driven by a rejection of the press’s role in producing the socially consensual narratives that are the basis of all political deliberation. A final punch, however, is added by the genuine, playful joy both men shown in Gray’s video clip seem to feel at this moment of teaching, learning, and using the newly acquired “skill.” They don’t seem to know much about the word or its history. Using it as a “meme” that spreads and easily crosses cultural borders, they are happy to use it, bereft of context, as they join a transnational movement of populist nationalists trolling the press. This chapter will engage the transnational success of new right-wing populism by zooming in on two formal features spotlighted by this example: a particular significatory playfulness, and a penchant for the decontextualized, incoherent, and thus—ideologically, geographically, culturally—highly mobile soundbite. To do so, I will model these two features as liminal to the symbolic form of narrative. Put differently, the appeal of populism is frequently explained by its offering up of “simple narratives,” an explanation that jibes with a general tendency on behalf of pundits, scholars, and activists to read politics as deeply narrative, a tendency I will explain in more detail below. Against this view of populism as a result of strong, simple narratives, I want to advance a counterintuitive claim: To understand the transnational success of new right populism, “narrative,” I will argue, is not a particularly helpful concept. 288

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Where narrative, understood as a symbolic form, stresses coherence, causality, and teleological drive, new populist rhetoric is marked by other symbolic dynamics. To get at these, it makes more sense to turn to other symbolic forms—here “play” and “database”—and to think about how this rhetoric profits from dwelling in the liminal areas between narrative, play, and database.1 After all, it might be this narrative depletion that facilitates the transnational compatibility of these new populist nationalisms. To make this argument, I will proceed in four steps: I will first briefly summarize the extent to which “narrative” has become a key term for understanding and discussing politics on both sides of the Atlantic, and, secondly, comment on its recent crisis. I will, thirdly, position narrative as a symbolic form, one among many, that shares a liminal region with other symbolic forms. Lastly, I will read single, exemplary rhetorical moments from these new right movements against the symbolic forms of play and database, respectively, to suggest that an interest in narrative liminality can focalize some of their non-narrative qualities.

Narrative in politics Long before the rise of Donald Trump, “narrative” emerged as a key category for discussing politics on both sides of the Atlantic, as even the most cursory glance at political reporting and punditry after the late 1990s shows. Conspicuously paralleling the work of politics and of reporting, the term is typically used to explain the persuasive power of political messaging. Understanding politics as narrative here creates a crucial interface between reading, writing, and politics, and it empowers journalists, pundits, and scholars alike to engage politics by analyzing narrative, i.e., by telling stories about storytelling. To give two brief examples: in this view, a chief function of President Obama was to be the “Narrator in Chief” (Bai 2012), and George W. Bush lost his grip on power and popularity not simply because he began a needless, catastrophic war, or because he steered the country into recession, but because he never recovered from the “Katrina Narrative” (Rich 2006, 201).2 The underlying premise of this interest in politics-as-narrative echoes the narrative turn in the humanities (and beyond): It assumes that much of our (perception of) reality is shaped by narratives, that reality and facts don’t simply “are” but that they gain their meaning, their relevance, and thus, their practical existence, by being “emplotted” into narrative (see Bruner 1998). Narrative here is characteristically loosely defined, but any minimal definition, to be meaningful, would have to include events that are causally related and that involve one or more actants. More importantly, the underlying framework assumes that the internal logics of narrative, “‘narrative necessity’ rather than […] empirical verification and logical requiredness” determine the acceptability and, thus, political and social salience, of narratives (Bruner 1991, 5). Narrative, in this view, has a particular quality of internal organization, narrativity, that makes the crucial difference between simply representing individual experiences and the kind of world making that organizes them into a meaningful whole. Narrative’s general popularity in discussions of politics made it a ready concept for explaining the rise of new right-wing populism in Europe and the US in the mid-2010s. Here, typically, the assumption is that populism provides particularly “simple” narratives that can help people understand a complex world. In one of many similar articles, characteristically pulling together Donald Trump, PEGIDA, and the new German nationalist party AfD, into one “Fleeting Modernity 2.0,” journalist Patrick Gensing (2016) for example writes that “Trump offers a clear narrative that cannot be refuted by facts because it relies on an ideology of irrationality, just like the German right extremists.”3 As he goes on to explain, a main asset of both Trump’s and PEGIDA’s narrative is its “closed” quality, “eine 289

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geschlossene Erzählung,” that does not rely on external validation and avoids internal contradictions.

Post-narrative politics While the notion of narratives in general, and of simple, closed narratives in particular, thus stands ready to explain the new nationalisms, the concept also is under increasing stress. This, in part, has to do with it simply being overused and exhausted, leading Erik Wemple to “Plea to Pundits: Stop Saying ‘Narrative’” (2016). As he shows, there are often other, more precise terms, which suggests that the fashionable “narrative” has expanded to a catch-all phrase for any kind of messaging. More importantly, much of the messaging of the new nationalists, in the US and in Germany, belies even the most rudimentary definitions of narrative. As The Economist summarizes: traditionally, political propaganda was “meant to be coherent,” in “post-truth politics,” however, there is no narrative coherence anymore: Content no longer comes in fixed formats and in bundles, such as articles in a newspaper, that help establish provenance and set expectations; it can take any shape—a video, a chart, an animation. A single idea, or “meme”, can replicate shorn of all context, like DNA in a test tube. (“Yes”) Notably, Donald Trump’s rhetoric fits that picture: often, his messaging is simply too incoherent to count as storytelling, leading, for example, the Boston Globe’s Michael A. Cohen to exclaim: To call this incoherent babble is an insult to incoherent babble. Trump jumps from one idea to another like a frog leaping from lily pad to lily pad. He regurgitates snippets of information that he appears to have gleaned from watching television, with no apparent sense of how they are connected to each other. It’s like taking a word salad and throwing it against a wall. (Cohen 2017) If a narrative’s power resides in its cohesion, in the “narrative necessity” of its development that strings together individual events into a meaningful whole, Trump fails miserably, and “narrative” can hardly be the category that explains his electoral success. Moreover, it is this incoherence, rather than the simple story, that unites Trumpism with the new German Nationalism of the AfD and PEGIDA. In his article, Gensing describes a speech by Björn Höcke, an AfD politician speaking at a rally, who attempts (and fails) to lay out a grand narrative of how the: multiculturalism of the old parties had destroyed the security fabric of the state. It is all a bit complicated, and Höcke has to work on his rhetoric some more. The reception is cool, so he boils things down: Many politicians want to destroy our state, he tells his audience angrily. This message resonates: chants against the “traitors of the people” echo through the night. (Gensing 2016) What this passage describes, then, is not the success of a narrative but narrative’s failure. It is only after Höcke has reduced his failing story to a single sound bite, a meme, a vignette that 290

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merely suggests narratives, rather than a chain of causally related events, that the audience catches on and answers with a ritualized chant. But it is not only the messaging of its leaders that makes the new right appear as a strangely under-storied movement. At the height of the PEGIDA marches and in response to allegations of censorship, several public German TV stations turned to putting the uncut raw material of their coverage of these marches online (Pegida 2017). Before, PEGIDA followers had complained that the cut, “censored,” versions of interviews conducted at the marches made them appear stupid, xenophobic, and extremist; now, their most striking feature was their incoherence. Rather than telling a—however simple—narrative of immigration, nation, and people, the protesters struggled to find words, tried to string together grievances, and mostly had trouble to meaningfully connect them to the march’s concern with the “Islamization of the Occident” (e.g. 0:08:32), after all the motto of the marches.4 The footage still showed racism and xenophobia, but more than anything it showed failures of articulation. Possibly the most striking form of such populist aphasia, then, is the PEGIDA anthem released in December 2015: it is literally without words and consists only of men’s voices humming (Aykanat 2017). If stories are a way of ordering experience, the inarticulate interviews and the inability to find words for the anthem speak of a lack of narrative, not the power of simple ones. Such meaning- and story-lessness resonates with an observation Slavoj Žižek made in 2006, when the new nationalist populism was still in its infancy. Commenting on the “French and Dutch no to the project of a European constitution,” he speaks of a clear-cut case of what in “French theory” is referred to as a floating signifier: a no of confused, inconsistent, overdetermined meanings, a kind of container in which the defense of workers’ rights coexists with racism, in which the blind reaction to a perceived threat and fear of change coexist with vague utopian hopes. […] The real struggle is going on now: the struggle for the meaning of this no—who will appropriate it? Who—if anyone—will translate it into a coherent alternate political vision? (Žižek 2006, 551) In his opposition between the “kind of container,” in which experiences can paradigmatically coexist in discontinuous form, and the “coherent […] political vision,” a sustained, syntagmatic structure that relates experiences to one another meaningfully, Žižek, without using the term, evokes the familiar logic of narrative. Narrative is expected to lend coherence to the “confused, inconsistent, overdetermined meanings” that otherwise simply reside next to one another. The resonance of the new right-wing populism, in spite of its lack of narrativity, then, seems to suggest that political salience here does not depend on narrative.

Symbolic forms and liminality Such a demise of the “symbolic form” of narrative has been prominently diagnosed as a symptom of the dawning computer age by media scholar Lev Manovich (1999). His notion of the symbolic form builds on Erwin Panofsky, who, in turn, had taken it from Ernst Cassirer, and the disciplinary and temporal distance the concept has traveled makes it hard to fully fix the term as Manovich understands it. For my purposes, his use might best be understood as referring to a particular logic of signification, a way of storing and transmitting experience that can be contrasted with other forms serving a similar cultural function but following different modi operandi. Indeed, Manovich’s main goal is to introduce the database 291

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as the “symbolic form of the computer age” (Manovich 1999, 81) and to contrast its logic with that of narrative. Accordingly, narrative as a symbolic form is characterized by its foregrounding of sequence, of syntagmatic coherence, a quality Manovich juxtaposes with the paradigmatic logic of the database, the elements of which signify not primarily by way of their connectivity but by way of their interchangeability (Manovich 1999, 89). Expanding on Manovich, and working along other presumed binary opposites of narrative, play would similarly constitute a symbolic form—one that is marked by nonlinearity, interactivity, speculative, rule-bounded experimentation, and agonistic competition.5 Notably, these different forms do not have to be considered as polar opposites, and they come with considerable overlap, but Manovich’s discussion of narrative and database as distinct symbolic forms does draw attention to the extent to which symbolic logics other than narrative might help discuss cultural phenomena. In Manovich’s account, database and narrative constitute “natural ‘enemies’” that are “[c]ompeting for the same territory of human culture, … to make meaning out of the world” (Manovich 1999, 85), and while he does acknowledge that these forms “produce endless hybrids” (Manovich 1999, 92), much of the work in his wake has focused on refining the opposition between different symbolic forms rather than focusing on the extent to which important cultural work happens precisely in the gray zones between them, most notably in the liminal zone between narrative and other forms.6 Such an approach is, for example, able to retain the narrative turn’s interest in world making while simultaneously focusing on the role other symbolic logics play. While much conceptual work needs to be done to harvest the analytic potential of such a perspective on narrative liminality,7 I will use the remaining pages of this chapter to read select instances of new right-wing rhetoric for how they tap into the liminal zone between the symbolic forms of play, database, and narrative.

Political speech as play and database Indeed, “play” might be an immensely productive register to think about some of the more puzzling aspects of new right rhetoric, as Katja Kanzler and Marina Scharlaj have already shown. Working to analyze the “mostly non-narrative nature of [Trump’s] campaign” (Kanzler and Scharlaj 2017, 321), they point out: Whereas exchanges between pop and politics used to be organized around the symbolic form of narrative and, more specifically, the genre of melodrama, Trump’s campaign orients itself toward what has been called the “gamedoc”-genre of reality tv in which the competitive game dominates as symbolic form. Among other things, this has had a grave impact on pop-cultural forms of political critique, which have been trained on the debunking of narratives. The symbolic logic of Trump’s campaign is not just tied to a new invective style of electoral politics, it has also preempted and deflated much pop-critique, recoding critical attacks in ways that actually strengthen the candidate. (Kanzler and Scharlaj 2017, 319) As Kanzler and Scharlaj argue, in his style (but also in his biography as a reality-tv star, of course), Trump is able to evoke the less-narrative symbolic order of the competitive reality tv show. While “narrative elements have become significantly reduced in his campaign communication in ways many observers register as an absence of semantic substance and coherence” (Kanzler and Scharlaj 2017, 321), it is precisely this absence of coherence and its 292

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substitution by a logic of competition that has allowed him to survive “debunking” criticism and attacks that continued to operate on the narrative plane and that hoped to derail his campaign by pointing to its incoherence and incongruity.8 While Kanzler and Scharlaj, interested in the invective mode, focus on the agonistic quality of play, this symbolic form can also go a long way in reading as “ludic” some of the— in traditional terms—outrageous claims, by Trump and his followers, as well as the German new right populists. Read thus, the goal of this game is finding and making the most outrageous statement possible while still getting away with it. Similar to a bullfight with decency (or: political correctness), the participants here make more and more risky moves only to pull away in the very last second, and the spectacular, winning quality lies not in the content of what is being said but in the skill of provocation.9 During the election, Donald Trump’s claim that “the Second Amendment people” might be able to stop Hillary Clinton, presumably by assassinating her, along with the multi-day controversy the statement spawned, is a prime example of this particular kind of playfulness. Notably made off the cuff, the full statement—“Though the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know”— contained just enough vagueness and deniability to be survivable.10 Accordingly, when Republican politicians, voters, and pundits then defended Trump by saying that he was joking, this was not just political tribalism; it also spoke to the suspension of seriousness the symbolic form of play entails: made as part of this “game,” the statement embraced play’s experimentation: It had long opted out of the referential contract that usually operates politics; it worked not indexically, referring to a real Clinton killed in a real world, but ludically, as a rhetorical stunt that showed the candidate’s trolling prowess because he was able to say such a thing without being burned. This particular ludic stunt quality was captured succinctly in the reaction, first visually and later verbally, of the “man in the red shirt” seated behind Trump as he made the remarks. The scene that shows his shock and disbelief, his mouthing of “wow” clearly recognizable, was replayed many times before he was found and interviewed.11 The visual and his remarks confirmed that he was jolted by the moment and that he despite (or because) of being “taken aghast” was going to vote for Trump. And his insistence that Trump was “trying to make a joke” underscores how solidly the crowd was operating in a ludic framework (CNN Newsroom 2017). Very similar dynamics, if less well documented, also operate in the German context, most compactly captured perhaps in Akif Pirinçci’s (failed) attempt at a similar stunt at a PEGIDA rally in 2015. Trying to get as close as possible to the taboo without being burned, the author suggested that German elites would like to gas the PEGIDA followers, but that, “unfortunately, the concentration camps were currently inoperative” (Sueddeutsche.de 2017). While Pirinçci had miscalculated—the PEGIDA organizers condemned his statements and his publisher ceased selling his books in protest—the underlying goal was the same as Trump’s: a “ludic” transgression, in which Pirinçci would make one of the most taboo statements in a German cultural contexts, regret over the absence of concentration camps, while hoping to get away with it by throwing in just enough obfuscation and deniability to stay in the game: after all, he did not wish for the camps to be restored, he alleged, in “ironic” exaggeration, that the German elites did so. Apart from such ludic dynamics, the new right populism’s lack “of semantic substance and coherence” (Kanzler and Scharlaj 2017, 321) also heavily resonates with the symbolic form of database as Manovich understands it. In this context, Kellyanne Conway, the Trump adviser who added the notion of “alternative facts” to the political lexicon, offers particularly intriguing examples: In July 2017, she appeared on television with flashcards with the words “Conclusion,” “Collusion,” “Illusion,” and “Delusion” to “argue” that the media’s interest 293

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in the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia was in fact delusional (Holpuch 2017). A few days later, she suggested in an interview with CNN’s Chris Wallace that in the context of “this ridiculous Russian Collusion Delusion” the American public were “promised the next Watergate and we don’t even have water polo, we don’t have a watermelon” (Walters 2017). While there is a certain ludic quality to both appearances,12 the underlying poetic principle in both cases is clearly that of paradigmatic interchangeability: In the first case, the phonetic similarity between the four nouns is meant to suggest that they occupy the same semantic space and can simply be exchanged for one another; in the second case, they are all, obviously, compound nouns involving water—which, by suggesting a general interchangeability of the serious and the banal, invariably also waters down the impact of “Watergate” as the epitome of political scandal. As spectacular, and as bizarre, as these two appearances may be, they sit particularly well with a political style that more generally discards a coherent, narrative political vision in favor of a database of underconnected statements from which followers can arbitrarily choose, combine, and recombine. While Conway thus is an extreme example, thinking about new right populism in general (and Donald Trump’s political appeal in particular) as being informed by a database logic can help explain his success in face of his incoherence. In a widely circulated post-election article on “The Data that Turned the World Upside Down,” Grassegger and Krogerus (2017) wrote about the Trump campaign’s data operation and the involvement of the advertising firm Cambridge Analytica. For the company that specializes on micro-targeting, i.e., on crafting a tailored message for every consumer/voter, “Trump’s striking inconsistencies, his much-criticized fickleness, and the resulting array of contradictory messages, suddenly turned out to be his great asset.” He did not provide a coherent narrative that his campaign would have to make voters believe in. Instead, he offered a vast database of mostly incoherent and incongruent sound bites, memes from which voters could pick and choose to manufacture their own projection of what they thought he said or meant.13 Speaking more generally, on both sides of the Atlantic, the new right populism is marked by a particular ideological mobility in which, apart from a fear of (Muslim) immigration, most other aspects, such as the views on finance, welfare, environment, gay and transgender rights, or infrastructure investments, can be added or dropped and freely recombined into countless configurations. The uncut PEGIDA interviews with their endless stream of people worrying over their retirement money, about the tax evasion of soccer manager Uli Hoeneß, about Salafists, about the border, and about a general disconnect between the political elite and the people, underscore how much these rallies and their anti-immigration sentiment served as a “container” full of “confused, inconsistent, overdetermined meanings” and how much the average PEGIDA supporters’ expression is more meaningfully described as reflecting a database of underconnected fears freely floating in paradigmatic association.

Conclusion The transnational rise of new right populisms, it thus seems, is not driven by a coherent vision, a narrative, simple, grand, or not, that makes sense of the world. Coming after the demise of grand narratives, it instead operates based on a toolbox of memes, a database of elements out of which their followers, in an interactive, rule-bound, and often experimental “ludic” process, construct their own narratives. Narrative alone, therefore, is not a helpful concept to understand the rhetoric of new right populism on either side of the Atlantic because it suggests a coherence these movements do not have and, apparently, do not need. Rather than subject the world to one coherent, grand-narrative interpretation, they dwell in 294

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the liminal areas narrative shares with other symbolic forms. Focusing on this liminality does not mean denying these movements narrativity altogether. But to understand the transnational success of new right populism, to understand how playful provocation and incoherent memes came to dominate politics, it is imperative to see how even the more narrative moments in these movements are fueled by other symbolic forms, such as play or database. After all, it might be precisely their non-narrative, fragmented, incoherent qualities that lend them such transnational mobility.

Notes 1 This methodological framework is heavily influenced by the conceptual work done in the “Narrative Liminalities” working group, and it owes massively to Katja Kanzler, Stefan Schubert, and Frank Usbeck. 2 For a more detailed reading of these two specific examples, see my respective essays (Herrmann 2009, 2015). Notably, thus focusing on the narrative quality of politics also allows for a particular form of interpretive audience engagement resembling a “popular narratology” (Herrmann 2015, 323): By discussing narrative and politics online, newspaper readers engage the narrative quality of politics in a particular textual-critical way, as “amateur narratologists,” as Jason Mittell has famously described the new, “sophisticated” pleasures of fan engagement of “complex television” (Mittell 2006, 38). 3 For German language sources, my translations throughout. 4 PEGIDA followers often lamented that their freedom of speech was censored by political correctness, and one possible reading of this is as an externalizing projection of such speechlessness: Faced with the inability to string together their experiences in a working narrative, they blamed outside censorship for their aphasia. 5 Play was cast as non-narrative most poignantly in the disciplinary debates about whether video games were a matter of narratology or ludology. For examples of this debate, see Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan (2006). 6 Most notably, N. Katherine Hayles (2007) has recast the binary as “symbiotic” rather than antagonistic. 7 As of 2018, such conceptual work is being done in a transnational research network funded by the DFG/German Research Foundation. For more information, please see www.narrative-liminality.de. 8 This dynamic is illustrated, e.g. by the futility of contrasting Trump’s behavior in office with his comments before. Accordingly, when CNN’s Jake Tapper, curiously invoking play, says that there is “a game we like to play around the office called, ‘Is there a tweet for that?’ Meaning has President Trump ever before criticized President Obama for doing the exact same thing he is now doing,” he actually does engage in a game of sorts. However, in this game, showing the incongruence between word and deed does not effectively criticize the president as it would were his appeal based on a coherent narrative of personal identity, character, and values. Instead, Tapper’s framing, involuntarily, underscores that the criticism really is “just” that: “a game we like to play around the office” (CNN 2017). 9 The same textual dynamics regulate the internet practice of trolling, a verbal game that similarly suspends seriousness and that is organized mostly around (more or less) skillful provocation. 10 Note how, as the game progressed during election season, Trump had amassed enough “credits” to make more plainly absurd and outrageous statements (such as his doubling down on how Obama being the founder of ISIS was not meant metaphorically but literally) without his campaign being seriously hurt (“Yes”). 11 The man’s ambivalent reaction of pleasurable disbelief would be called a “pop” in the terminology of professional wrestling, another register immensely helpful for understanding the dynamics around Donald Trump’s political success. (For more on politics, representation and wrestling, see Herrmann (2016)). 12 The Guardian’s Amanda Holpuch picks up on this by titling her article on the incident “Cards Against Humanity,” in allusion to the popular party game in which participants are forced to make taboo and politically incorrect statements. Conway chided her critics afterwards for not having enough humor to appreciate her performance. 13 For a related, if inverse, perspective, see O’Neill (2016), who reads Trump as akin to a machine learning algorithm trained on the data set of his supporters.

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Bibliography Aykanat, Deniz. “Soundtrack des besorgten Bürgers.” sueddeutsche.de 2015. Bai, Matt. “Still Waiting for the Narrator in Chief.” The New York Times 30 October 30, 2012. Bruner, Jerome. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18.1 (1991): 1–21. Bruner, Jerome. “What Is a Narrative Fact?” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 560 (1998): 17–27. CNN.Com. “Transcripts.” July 18, 2017. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1707/18/cg.01. html. CNN Newsroom with Brooke Baldwin. 2016. https://archive.org/details/CNNW_20160810_180000_ CNN_Newsroom_With_Brooke_Baldwin. Cohen, Michael A. “An Incoherent President Trump.” The Boston Globe July 20, 2017. Gensing, Patrick. “Flüchtige Moderne 2.0 – Der Hass als neue Konstante.” Patrick Gensing / Blogger & Journalist November 9, 2016. Grassegger, Hannes and Mikael Krogerus. “The Data That Turned the World Upside Down.” Motherboard (2017): n. pag. Gray, Rosie. “Friendly Interaction Outside the Press Pen.” @RosieGray October 22, 2016. https://twit ter.com/RosieGray/status/789985264282271744/video/1. Hayles, N. Katherine. “Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts.” PMLA 122. 5 (2007): 1603–1608. Herrmann, Sebastian M. “‘Ruled by Fiction?’ ‘Real’ Deception and Narrative Truth in Frank Rich’s The Greatest Story Ever Sold.” Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies 10 (2009): n. pag. Herrmann, Sebastian M. “‘To Tell a Story to the American People’: Elections, Postmodernism, and Popular Narratology.” Electoral Cultures: American Democracy and Choice. Eds. Georgiana Banita and Sascha Pöhlmann. Heidelberg: Winter, 2015. 323–339. Herrmann, Sebastian M. “Wrestling with the Real: Politics, Journalism, History in Frost/Nixon, and the Complex Realism of Kayfabe.” Amerikastudien – American Studies 61. 1 (2016): 11–31. Holpuch, Amanda. “Cards against Humanity: Kellyanne Conway Mocked for Fox News Stunt.” The Guardian July 13, 2017. Kanzler, Katja, and Marina Scharlaj. “Between Glamorous Patriotism and Reality-TV Aesthetics: Political Communication, Popular Culture, and the Invective Turn in Trump’s United States and Putin’s Russia.” Zeitschrift Für Slawistik 62. 2 (2017): 316–338. Manovich, Lev. “Database as Symbolic Form.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 5. 2 (1999): 80–99. Mittell, Jason. “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television.” The Velvet Light Trap 58. 1 (2006): 29–40. Noack, Rick. “The Ugly History of ‘Lügenpresse,’ a Nazi Slur Shouted at a Trump Rally.” October 24, 2016. O’Neill, Cathy. “Donald Trump Is like a Biased Machine Learning Algorithm.” Mathbabe August 11, 2016. Panofsky, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Pegida. “Die Interviews in voller Länge, Teil I.” NDR, 2014. http://www.ardmediathek.de/tv/Pa norama/Pegida-Die-Interviews-in-voller-L%C3%A4nge-/Das-Erste/Video?bcastId=310918&docum entId=25442126. Rich, Frank. The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush’s America. New York: Penguin, 2006. Sueddeutsche.de. “Lutz Bachmann entschuldigt sich für Pirinçci-Auftritt.” 2015. The Economist. “Yes, I’d Lie to You.” September 10, 2016. Walters, Joanna. “Trump’s New Chief of Staff Will Establish Clear ’Pecking Order’, Staffers Say.” The Guardian July 30, 2017. Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, and Pat Harrigan, eds. First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Wemple, Erik. “A Plea to Pundits: Stop Saying ‘Narrative.’” Washington Post February 10, 2016. “Yes, I’d Lie to you.” The Economist September 10, 2016. Žižek, Slavoj. “Against the Populist Temptation.” Critical Inquiry 32. 3 (2006): 551–574.

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25 AMERICAN REALITIES A European perspective on Trump’s America1 Liam Kennedy

Introduction Let’s begin with a European question: “Are Americans really stupid?” This is a question posed, or better reported by the Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz in his book The Captive Mind, published in 1953. Milosz had experienced the horrors of both WWI and WWII directly, and in The Captive Mind he sought to explore and explain the psychology and appeal of authoritarianism and more particularly of totalitarianism. He also addresses what he sees as an American ignorance of the realities of totalitarianism: “Are Americans really stupid?” I was asked in Warsaw. In the voice of the man who posed the question, there was despair, as well as the hope that I would contradict him. This question reveals the attitude of the average person in the people’s democracies toward the West: it is despair mixed with a residue of hope. During the last few years, the West has given these people a number of reasons to despair politically. […] Before the countries of Central and Eastern Europe entered the sphere of the Imperium, they lived through the Second World War. That war was much more devastating there than in the countries of Western Europe. It destroyed not only their economies, but also a great many values which had seemed till then unshakeable. (Milosz 2001[1953], 25) Milosz goes on to describe how conditions of totalitarian oppression shake human faith in the “naturalness” of their surroundings and remarks on how this distinguishes peoples of the East and the West. The man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are. Their resultant lack of imagination is appalling. Because they were born and raised in a given social order and in a given system of values, they believe that any other order must be “unnatural,” and that it cannot last because it is 297

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incompatible with human nature. But even they may one day know fire, hunger, and the sword. (Milosz 2001[1953], 29) This question—“Are Americans really stupid?” —is worth repeating today, not as a cheeky response to the wisdom of electing Trump but to reconsider Milosz’s concern with whether Americans lack the experience and imagination to grasp the realities of totalitarianism. Are they, as Milosz implied in 1953, cut off from history, inured in their relative comfort and ignorance? To what extent is this “naturalisation” of American reality now in crisis? A correlative question: Why is the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States proving challenging to comprehend and interpret well after its initial, shocking impact? Even as the dust clears and the shockwaves recede and we begin to formulate frames and narratives to explain what happened, there is something excessive and confounding about this presidency that not only beggars belief but impedes critical interpretation—a sense that the very grounds of analysis and argument have shifted, that a paradigm shift is underway that many barely grasp at this time. In this chapter, I offer some reflections on aspects of this paradigm shift and challenges it poses for Americanists, with a particular interest in what it means for those of us who are transnational in perspective, whether by inclination or geography or both. One of the challenges for those of us “outside” the US is to recognise the ways in which our study is always already bound up with the present conditions of its (geo)political imperatives and actions; our positionality is both privileged and compromised. And so, more particularly, I will consider several European perspectives on the significance of Trump’s presidency.

Something happened In the wake of Trump’s election there was a rush by commentators—journalists, pollsters, academics—to question what it meant and why they had failed to see it coming. Many expressed a frustrating sense of failure, that something had blindsided them, they seemed confounded by events and processes they were supposed to know something about. For all these commentators, there was a sense, somewhat nebulous, that the grounds of analysis and debate had shifted—something happened—and that something exceeded existing means of explanation and representation. For the journalists, the challenge has been to understand and respond to the dynamics and consequences of what has come to be called “post-truth” politics, where conviction trumps facts and the norms of political communication have been radically disrupted. For the academics (and especially the academic left: academic apologists for Trump are thin on the ground), the issue has been seismic in a different way, with apprehension of a paradigm shift, or at least some intense pressure being put on paradigms commonly used to study the US. What combines these concerns is a far-reaching delegitimisation of knowledge and expertise that is now widely assumed to evidence a crisis in and of liberal democracy. To argue that the Trump election and early presidency exceeds existing means of explanation and representation is not to say it is unknowable or beyond interpretation but is rather to underline that it challenges the grounds and frames of interpretation to the degree these have functioned based on assumptions about truth and democracy. We need to consider fresh ways of looking at “America” as an object of knowledge. Of course, this has long been a focal issue for American Studies scholars, many of whom have a troubled relationship to their object of knowledge and the status of the nation as a site of meaningful community and identity. To be sure, the challenge to think afresh is certainly not the preserve of 298

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Americanists alone but there is a particular onus on us to critically attend to it. We should not be complacent about our paradigms or tools of knowledge; even those of us who have critiqued the values and assumptions of liberal democracy are challenged to think anew as these are shifting before our eyes. We are at a complex, pivotal point of paradigm change, where the bedrock of American liberal democracy has been mined and the conventions of critical inquiry not to mention active dissent are being compromised if not rendered obsolete. For a great many Americans, America changed on November 9th, 2016. Recall the references to unreality and dislocation expressed by so many; some commentators spoke of a form of collective trauma. It is easy to belittle such reactions, especially as the sky did not fall in. Or did it? After all, the measurement most media reports used to assure Americans that the sky had not fallen in, were reports that markets had not only stayed stable but risen. This was a good result and all was well with America. That the reason the markets jumped was because corporations foresaw greater profits under Trump barely seemed to register in this collective delusion of what represented the national interest. If anything, this turn to the markets to measure the public good represents the way in which neoliberalism has recast democratic ideals in corporate terms. It is precisely such normative articulation of normality that is called into question by the Trump election. Again and again, commentators have looked for some kind of return to normality: the idea that as president-elect Trump would suddenly learn or at least mimic civility; the idea that the Office of the Presidency would curb and reshape his wayward temperament; that the role would subsume the man as we are often told it does. Mark Danner, observing the early weeks of the Trump presidency remarked that there has been “an ongoing seminar on where norms end and laws begin, of how much of what we relied on when it came to the president’s conduct rested largely on a heretofore unquestioned foundation of centuries-old custom” (Danner 2017). This desire for normality reflects a concern that the election of Trump is something more, something different from the normal run of Republican and Democrat presidencies. What if Trump’s presidency represents an irreparable tear in the fabric of American liberal reality? Might it be that underlying the apprehension that with Trump’s election nothing will “be as it used to be” resides a deeper fear that “nothing had ever been the way it used to be” (Hemon 2017). There is a distinctively parochial American myopia about what constitutes normative political and social reality, a myopia that registers a profound naturalisation of American reality, fed by delusions of continuity, such that liberal democracy functions as an ontological bubble. American liberals apprehend this bubble as a fixed horizon; they find it hard to think outside its doxa, they fail to consider that alternative realities are possible and that the edifice of reality is precarious. We might say, to borrow from Frederic Jameson, that Americans can more readily imagine the end of the world than imagine the end of liberal capitalism (Jameson 2003, 77). There has however been a shift in American reality, which though recently perceived as sudden has in fact been a slow-motion decline in the symbolic efficiency of liberal democracy (Dean 2009). It is marked by an ever-closer relationship between economic and political sectors and actors, the regression of the public sphere, and the hollowing out of civil society by the logic of the market. Such shifts in American reality are always at work but sometimes they are seismic, sometimes something happens.

A celebrity enters the White House Let us visit an earlier moment of seismic shift in American reality. Reflecting on the 1960 televised debates between presidential candidates Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, the novelist Philip Roth, in 1961, lamented: 299

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The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality […] The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist […] on the TV screen, as a real public image, a political fact, my mind balked at taking [Nixon] in. Whatever else the television debates produced in me, I should like to point out, as a literary curiosity, that they also produced a type of professional envy. (Roth 1961) This sense that reality was outrunning the capacities of writers to represent it was not new, but tellingly articulated by Roth as a challenge occasioned by the growth of televisual media and the transformation of American politics into spectacle. His comments presciently indicated something profound and shattering: an epochal shift in the “American reality.” It is not coincidental that Roth was writing at the start of a period of intense social and political unrest in the US. As he pilloried many contemporary American writers for failing to respond to this epochal change, he noted one exception: “There is Norman Mailer. And he is an interesting example, I think, of one in whom our era has provoked such a magnificent disgust that dealing with it in fiction has almost come to seem, for him, beside the point” (Roth 1961). Sure enough, Mailer helped fashion a “new journalism” that could cope with the emerging society of the spectacle in the 1960s. In his 1960 essay on Kennedy’s election campaign, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” Mailer described the president-to-be as an “existential hero” who could tap into the drives that roil the national unconscious (Mailer 1960). This reflected Mailer’s very particular vision of American history: Our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics, which is concrete, factual, practical […] and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation. (Mailer 1960) In Kennedy, Mailer saw someone who could fuse these historical currents and potentially renew the nation: “Only a hero can capture the secret imagination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his nation” (Mailer 1960). To be sure, he recognised the dangers in celebrating a “superman” as leader, but reckoned Kennedy struck the right balance between rational substance and romantic style. Mailer’s perspective may have been perversely romantic, but this was also its power as a dissenting vision, attuned to “the dream life of the nation.” American reality now seems to be undergoing another seismic shift, again in sync with a cycle of civil unrest. And once again, reality appears to be outrunning American writers as they struggle to explain it, to make it credible. Step forward another Übermensch. Is Trump an existential hero in the mode Mailer described? And if he really is someone “who reveals the character of the country to itself” what does he reveal about the character of the US today? (Mailer 1960) There is no doubt that Trump has channelled the discontents of the nation, and tapped into angers and resentments that are more than politics as usual. He dares to say what should not be said, shocking the political and cultural elites, speaking to and for the “real Americans” in their language, giving voice to their inarticulate anger and thwarted dreams. He eschews the discourse of decency and decorum. 300

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Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” is in some part an articulation and legitimization of what has been disavowed in the making of a liberal democracy. He promises national renewal, but not the progressive, forward-looking renewal promised by Kennedy. Instead, he offers a regressive, backward-looking nationalism. For Mailer, Kennedy’s heroism was inherent in his ability to balance glamorous style with political substance. Trump demonstrates no such ability; quite the opposite: he displays an excess of style and a deficit of substance. His brand of heroism, such as it is, marks a new stage in the aestheticization of politics in which American entertainment and political life have converged as never before. Trump’s celebrity is the lifeblood of his appeal, and he astutely understands his currency as a performer: “I will be so presidential” he promised while campaigning; “I play to people’s fantasies,” he remarks in his book The Art of the Deal; and “I call it truthful hyperbole,” he asserts without irony (Lozada 2015). Trump is the superman unleashed as celebrity phantasm, a figure of libidinal jouissance who leeringly embodies the obscene underside of liberal democracy. And as was his campaign, so his presidency has been shadowed by neo-fascist subtexts and authoritarian tendencies.2 As in the 1960s, today’s cultural and political turmoil is playing out in struggles over identity, representation and recognition—but in a more profound sense, the American reality itself has changed. This is not identity politics as we knew it; this is the politics of “wounded attachments,” of resentment and grievance, the politics of all-or-nothing (Brown 1993). Trump’s gift for seizing attention and peddling fantasy plugs him into the zeitgeist and bemuses those who believe lies should have consequences. For many liberal, educated Americans, Trump’s political ascension is a confusing assault on their sense of reality.

Reality inertia Trump’s victory should remind Americans just how fragile the social and political order so many take for granted is—and how quickly an advanced democracy can be dragged into or at least towards barbarism. Is it not a little shocking that Americans should need to be reminded of this? Perhaps not, perhaps the amnesia is a component of the American worldview. The American writer Tom Wolfe echoed this amnesia in mocking fashion when he remarked that the “dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe” (Wolfe 1976, 117). Might it be that the import of Trump’s election is better or at least more readily understood in other countries where there is a living memory of the pains of populist authoritarianism, where people are more familiar with how reality can be dismantled. The Slovenian-American writer Alexsandar Hemon suggests as much when, in the wake of Trump’s election, he commented: “In America, a comfortable entitlement blunts and deactivates imagination—it is hard to imagine that this American life is not the only life possible, that there could be any reason to undo it” (Hemon 2017). Hemon filters his perspective through his experiences and insights from living in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, “through a time when what cannot possibly happen begins to happen, rapidly and everywhere” (Hemon 2017). He writes: People asked me if I had known the war was coming—I did, I’d say, I just didn’t know I did, because my mind refused to accept the possibility that the only life and reality I had known could be so easily annihilated. I perceived and received information but could not process it and convert it into knowledge, because the mind 301

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could not accept the unimaginable, because I had no access to an alternative ontology. (Hemon 2017) Chastising Americans for their “scramble for the ontological blanket of reality inertia” following Trump’s election, Hemon wryly notes that “‘Reality’ has finally earned its quotation marks” (Hemon 2017). Europeans have their own sharp memories, of course. We might note, following Trump’s election, the increase in the sales of books by a number of European writers who have discoursed on totalitarianism, perhaps most notably George Orwell and Hannah Arendt. Might the fresh interest in Arendt be because she constantly reminded her reader of how capitalist exploitation can create the conditions for far-right totalitarianism? Leading European intellectuals have been vocal in interpreting Trump’s election in relation to a continental history of fascist politics and leadership. The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman labels Trump a “decisionist” leader, using Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereign power that explained the first stages of Nazism, “a rule that has its sole […] foundation and legitimation in the will of the ruler” (Bauman 2016). The ascension of Trump confirms Bauman’s belief that “we are currently witnessing […] a thorough re-hashing of allegedly untouchable principles of ‘democracy’” and the prospect of these being replaced by “condensation of power within an authoritarian or even dictatorial model” (Bauman 2016). The French philosopher Alain Badiou views Trump as an example of an emergent “democratic fascism,” the “apparition of a new figure of political determination which is a figure which is very often inside the democratic constitution but which is in some sense also outside” (Badiou 2016). In part, this is a repetition of the European lesson that fascism is birthed by democracy but it is also a warning that politics is being erased by contemporary conditions. Badiou posits Trump as the symbol of the “disparition” of politics, “because, what is the politics of Trump? Nobody knows. It’s something like a figure and not a politics” (Badiou 2016). He has argued the need to “think beyond the affect” caused by Trump’s presidency; he warns that if we do not “we are only in the fascination, the stupidity of fascination, by the depressive success of Trump” (Badiou 2016). A significant theme in European journalism throughout the first year of the Trump presidency has been the dangers of authoritarian populism and leadership. The Spanish journalist Andres Miguel Rondon, in a piece published by Politico in April 2017, took issue with American naivety about “alternative realities,” observing pithily that “the developed world seems to be discovering this concept [the postfactual universe] for the first time” (Rondon 2017). In the article he describes his own experiences of growing up in Venezuela “surrounded by a fictional universe of [Hugo] Chavez’s making” (Rondon 2017). Rondon distils the populist appeal of an alternative reality: Populism is not a system of facts or solutions, operating in the complex world of policy and legislation, but rather an interactive fiction, borne of posturing and symbolism, where whole countries can become not what they are, but what they believe themselves to be. (Rondon 2017) Trump’s populist appeal in the United States posits just such an interactive fiction, a dramaturgy of Trump’s making and orchestration, of continual disruption and outrage. His deceptions are widely endorsed as an alternative reality—the frightening story is not that 302

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Trump lies but that he is mandated to do so, his very performance of lies and fabrications is what designates his reality for supporters.

Conclusions Of course, there is a good deal of schadenfreude in European commentaries on American travails, yet these Europeans comment with a sensitivity about authoritarian populism that is rarely articulated so sharply in American culture. It is a sensitivity that is shared among large European publics, which have responded to the spectre of fascism with both alarm and action. In France, a liberal front formed to prevent Marie LePen from winning the presidency; many held their noses in doing so but the memory of fascism remains powerful, and values are not taken for granted. For all the talk of a transatlantic wave of populism, linking ethnonationalist energies in Europe and the US, there have been major setbacks for the political right in elections across Europe in 2017. In some part this is a backlash against Trump, who is deeply unpopular in Europe. At the same time, Europeans are taking a fresh look at their geopolitical positions and relations. A poll taken in February 2017 showed that only 22% of Germans thought the US a trustworthy partner, only one percentage point above Russia (Mortimer 2017). European leaders are now openly opining that Europe must not rely on the US any longer. Angela Merkel, speaking in late May 2017, shortly after the G7 group met in Sicily, stated: “The times in which we could completely depend on others are, to a certain extent, over…I’ve experienced that in the last few days. We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands” (Henley 2017). While this does not mean a collapse of transatlantic relations, it does indicate quite a radical reconfiguration of those relations. The present turmoil in these relations is a reminder that “America” has long figured as a screen for European discontents and desires. For much of the twentieth century and now into the twenty-first, the US has functioned as “a tertium comparationis” in cultural and political struggles in Europe, centering on the control of the discourses of national and transnational European identities (Kroes 1999, 465). Debates on Americanization and discourses of anti-Americanism have frequently activated this dialectic. Most recently, it has been present in the debates about borders, security, and immigration that are running at a heightened, tabloid-sensationalized pitch in Europe. In such a volatile political context, European efforts to critique or interpret American power or leadership take on an especially potent dialectical charge, reflecting back on the uncertainties in European futures. The spectres of European empires and their fallout—of (de)colonizations, sectarian divisions, wars and genocides—haunt the warnings by European intellectuals about the dangers of authoritarian populism, just as they haunt efforts to formulate an effective political expression for the historical and moral identity of Europe and generate an alternative to US global power.3 The current reconfiguring of America in the European imagination is indicative of the epistemological and interpretive challenges presented to Americanists by the ascent of Trump and his presidency’s disruption and distortions of the grounds and object of our analysis. With the Trump presidency, the US has gone through the looking glass into a new symbolic order of mediated political and cultural reality, one that we are barely beginning to understand. As the new American reality takes shape we need to be alert to our own illusions and delusions, and to the ways “America” has functioned as a screen for our ideological and theoretical disquisitions and assumptions. For Americanists whose critique has focused on hegemonic illusions of reality enforced by capitalist relations of power, the paradigm shift in American

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reality brings our object of study into question and out of focus in new ways. We may, as Slavoj Zizek quips, begin to long for the old days of American hypocrisy.

Notes 1 A portion of this essay was previously published (Kennedy 2017). 2 During his inaugural address, Trump stated his convictions that “at the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America” and that “we all bleed the same red blood of patriots” (Trump 2017). 3 Again and again, these projects are linked together in the dialectics of Atlantic debate. In other words, the challenge of and to American hegemony energizes discourses of and on European identity and the efforts to distinguish this identity signify the borders and spectres that traverse its symbolic presence in the discourses (Kennedy 2006, 135).

Bibliography Badiou, Alain. “Reflections on the Recent Election.” Verso Books Blogs November 15, 2016. verso books.com/blogs/2940-alain-badiou-reflections-on-the-recent-election. Bauman, Zygmunt. “How Neoliberalism Prepared the Way for Donald Trump.” Social Europe November 16, 2016. socialeurope.eu/how-neoliberalism-prepared-the-way-for-donald-trump. Brown, Wendy. “Wounded Attachments.” Political Theory 21. 3 (1993): 390–410. Danner, Mark. “What He Could Do.” The New York Review of Books March 23, 2017. nybooks.com/a rticles/2017/03/23/what-trump-could-do. Dean, Jodi. Democracy and Other Liberal Fantasies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Hemon, Alexsandar. “Stop Making Sense, Or How to Write in the Age of Trump.” Village Voice January 17, 2017. villagevoice.com/2017/01/17/stop-making-sense-or-how-to-write-in-the-age-of-trump. Henley, Jon. “Angela Merkel: EU Cannot Completely Rely on US and Britain Anymore.” Guardian May 28, 2017. theguardian.com/world/2017/may/28/merkel-says-eu-cannot-completely-rely-on-us-and-britain-a ny-more-g7-talks. Jameson, Fredric. “Future City.” New Left Review 21 (2003): 65–79. Kennedy, Liam. “Spectres of Comparison: American Studies and the United States of the West.” Comparative American Studies (2006): 135–150. Kennedy, Liam. “The Trump Era Has Begun – How Can We Make Sense Of It?” The Conversation January 20, 2017. https://theconversation.com/the-trump-era-has-begun-how-can-we-make-sense-of-it-71311. Kroes, Rob. “American Empire and Cultural Imperialism: A View From the Receiving End.” Diplomatic History 23. 3 (1999): 463–477. Lozada, Carlos. “How Donald Trump Plays the Press, In His Own Words.” Washington Post. June 17, 2015. washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2015/06/17/how-donald-trump-plays-the-press-inhis-own-words/?utm_term=.59fdac078233. Mailer, Norman. “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.” Esquire. November, 1960; December 8. http:// www.esquire.com/news-politics/a3858/superman-supermarket. Milosz, Czeslaw. The Captive Mind. London: Penguin, 2001[1953]. Mortimer, Caroline. “Germans Now Find US as Trustworthy as Russia.” The Independent. February 3, 2017. independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-russia-america-poll-trustworthy-trump-putinwhite-house-muslim-ban-eu-a7562276.html. Rondon, Andres Miguel. “Donald Trump’s Fictional America.” Politico. April 2, 2017. politico.com/maga zine/story/2017/04/donald-trumps-fictional-america-post-fact-venezuela-214973. Roth, Philip. “Writing American Fiction.” Commentary. March 1, 1961. commentarymagazine.com/arti cles/writing-american-fiction. Trump, Donald. “The Inaugural Address.” January 20, 2017. whitehouse.gov/inaugural-address. Wolfe, Tom. “The Intelligent Coed’s Guide to America.” Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1976.

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PART V

Remapping geographies and genres

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26 THE PERFORMANCE OF AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE Rhetoric and symbolic forms in American Western movies Boris Vejdovsky

“You’re the great Western Barbarian, stepping forth in his innocence and might, gazing a while at this poor corrupt old world and then swooping down on it,” Mrs. Tristram tells Christopher Newman, the protagonist of Henry James’s 1877 novel The American (James 1978, 45). The novel opens in Paris, in 1868, as Christopher Newman peruses the Louvre with avid eyes and an aesthetic headache caused by the encounter of his curious though rather unsophisticated mind with too many paintings. The Parisian museum is part of the American’s superlative grand tour of Europe in which he is questing for “the biggest kind of entertainment a man can get, people, places, art, nature, everything!” (James 1978, 33). As he further proclaims, “I want to see the tallest mountains, and the bluest lakes, the finest pictures and the most handsome churches, and the most celebrated men, and the most beautiful women” (James 1978, 33). Christopher Newman is, as both his name and surname suggest, a man of remote European origins regenerated, reborn, into a new man in the matrix of the land he now comes from, the American West: he is a Westerner from San Francisco and he is the American. He is also an American capitalist, a man of executive power who has “come abroad to amuse [himself],” though he admits he doubts whether “[he] know[s] how” (James 1978, 28). He wishes to acquire and possess that which his native land has not given him and which he eagerly and hyperbolically lists. Henry James, the sophisticated American expatriate, pokes fun at Newman who gets to be called a “Western Barbarian,” a “Barbarian” coming from the remotest displacement of the frontier in the United States, a place where, as James would say, “History, as yet, has left … but so thin and impalpable a deposit that we very soon touch the hard substratum of nature; and nature herself, in the western world, has the peculiarity of something rather crude and immature” (James 2004a, 417). In this early novel, James commences with a series of characters—from Christopher Newman to Winterbourne, John Marcher and several others—that would enable him to explore the transnational cultural differential between the United States and Europe. The American is an example of what Leslie Fiedler called an “Eastern,” that is, a novel that tackles the relation of the young American republic to its cultural and political pre-history through “the return of the American to the Old World,” for “only then,” Fiedler notes, “does he 307

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know for sure that he is an American” (James 2004a, 19). James’s novel further suggests that America, and the American West in particular, is both politically and aesthetically amorphous. For James, the absence of history and political community is related to the absence of aesthetic formation, which leads to his famous indictment of his nation; in America, according to him, there is, No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no diplomatic services, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class, no Epsom nor Ascot! ( James 2004a, 419) This passage is nearly as hyperbolic in its negativity as Christopher Newman’s eager desire to imbibe the aesthetics of the old world is hyperbolic in its enthusiasm, and James muses, “one might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left” (James 2004a, 419). James’s Christopher Newman is a barbarian who lacks not only aesthetic formation—hence his headache—but also political and ethical formation. This is what Newman will demonstrate in the novel through his poor judgment about art, and this is also what his fictional followers, Winterbourne or Marcher, will demonstrate in their poor understanding of communal and sexual politics, and the reciprocal absence of aesthetic and political formation leads in James’s works to the deaths of Daisy Miller and May Bartram. In both cases, the flowery and pastoral women, Daisy and May, are killed by the barbarianism of the men ignorant of both aesthetics and politics. James’s post-Civil War novel thus poses the question of aesthetic and political forms in the United States and what I will be calling the “prosodic performance” of these forms. Rather than dissociating them, James suggests that aesthetics and politics (in the broad sense of the life of a community in a polis) are related, and that the absence of forms—for after all, both aesthetics and politics are essentially formal—is the source of tragedy and violence against those (women, the poor, the disenfranchised) who cannot find their place in the community. To remedy that, James, like many of his characters, turned to Europe to find the aesthetic and political forms he felt his nation to be lacking. He turned to Europe and to the history of European aesthetics (as his examples that combine history, art and politics suggest) to provide forms to the American novel and American history.1 From what he perceived as his barbarian land James does not appear to expect anything: with its thin historical substratum America does not seem to be able to produce the aesthetic and political forms that may inform the nation, that is, give it the shape and the semblance of a modern cultured nation state; these forms could only be retrieved from Europe, hence the Eastern tropism of James’s characters and James himself. Going back to Europe to find the forms that could inform amorphous America is a movement that Leslie Fiedler identified as one of the cardinal points of American fiction. In The Return of the Vanishing of the American, Fiedler coins the names “Eastern,” “Southern” and “Northern” as literary genres and spatial orientation points to complement the “Western,” the popular genre most people are familiar with (Fiedler 1968, 16). Fiedler’s study thus reminds us how central geography and the sense of space are in any definition of American culture.2 Fiedler’s study reminds us that James’s intricate Easterns, his novels and stories that present us with US characters traveling “back” East to Europe, are contemporary both in their writing and their narrative temporality with the short historical period of the American 308

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Western as it was framed by cinema. While the musings of a Newman, Marcher or Winterbourne seem very remote from the spurred strutting of Ethan Edwards, Wyatt Earp or Ringo Kid, we are reminded that these characters are all contemporaneous with each other, even though they represent opposite cardinal points of American history and culture. They are representatives of opposite ways of informing the US, either by extracting European forms out of its historical non-American past, a sort of American prehistory, or by inventing America’s idiosyncratic forms out of their new cultural geography. The new direction would require not only a new sense of orientation in space, but also a new medium to produce new symbolic forms: cinema. The new geographical direction would account for different artistic productions. For today’s readers and viewers, it might prove all the more difficult to conceive of Christopher Newman and Ethan Edwards, the protagonist of John Ford’s The Searchers, as two contemporaneous “Western Barbarians,” insofar as James’s novel and Ford’s movie do not seem to belong to the same cultural categories. Although critics have sometimes deemed The American flawed, especially in its melodramatic second part, James’s novel belongs to the tradition of high culture and to a genealogy of artistic expression that prefigures (high) modernism. Henry James is a representative of the world of rarefied fiction, an aesthete who draws his readers into a maze of psychological and emotional nuances and ineffable historical effects. Nothing seems more remote from the riddled musings of James’s protagonists than the violent actions of characters impersonated by John Wayne, Gary Cooper, or Charles Bronson on the silver screen; nothing seems more remote from the unfathomable “hm”s of Prince Amerigo in The Golden Bowl than Ethan’s mantra, “That’ll be the day,” in The Searchers. The difference of genre between the Eastern and the Western, especially in its filmic version, is also a difference of cultural category. The former addresses a cultural elite; the latter is a popular art. The former is predicated on the studious reading of a notation by an elite; the latter depends on the iterative performance of a popular form. While the protagonists of James’s Easterns belong to a highbrow culture mostly unavailable to the philistines they deride, the forms of the Western procure the performance of popular forms that inform the nation that James found, precisely, so devoid of form. And it does take a bit of imagination to realize that the dense psychological plotting of The American, The Wings of the Dove, “Daisy Miller” and “The Pupil,” to name just a few, are contemporaneous with the showdown at the OK Corral between Wyatt Earp and the Clanton brothers. But while the cushy salons of James’s novelistic writing take us back to a political and semantic régime of the past that American artists like James felt they could only belatedly imitate, the rugged landscapes of the West and the rustic interiors of the ranch framed by Ford’s or Howard Hawks’s cinematography would give the US its original popular aesthetic and political forms. The opening scenes of The American and of The Searchers show Christopher Newman roaming through the Louvre while Ethan Edwards is arriving at his brother’s ranch in Texas. While Newman is looking for art in Europe, searching for the signs of high culture that are missing in the US, Edwards is searching for Debbie in the American West, thus interpreting the signs of the American West and translating them into an American aesthetic and political narrative told—or framed—by Ford’s camera. The contemporary time setting of this classic Eastern and this classic Western contrasts not only their themes and geographical settings, as Fiedler suggests, but also two ways of providing America with cultural forms: while James sends his protagonists out to quest for “the items of high civilization … which are absent from the texture of American life,” John Ford sends Ethan in search of Debbie, and in this quest his camera invents popular, idiosyncratically American aesthetic and political forms, whose performance has been informing the nation for the last century. 309

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It would be idle to seek to adjudicate superior merit to the Eastern or the Western, just as it would be unavailing to compare the artistic achievements of Henry James and John Ford. On the other hand, we can compare how the different geographies of American art forms have determined the public addressed by that art and its performative effects in US culture. James’s novels are constitutive of the corpus of high art whose dogma is “that there are some books … an appreciation of which distinguishes the elect from the vulgar, the sensitive from the gross” (Fiedler 1968, 20). On the other hand, as one of the best critics of the genre put it, Western movies have often been perceived as “formulaic, empty, the enemy of art” (Kitses 2007, 1). These statements catch the often-repeated dichotomy between art and entertainment, between high culture and popular, or, between the notation of culture and its prosodic performance. In what follows I propose that the new symbolic forms of Western movies bridge the gap between what has been considered in the wake of Modernism as the dichotomy between high culture and popular culture. This is not to say that Westerns provide some sort of synthesis between the two, or that their aesthetics or their political message has a superior redeeming value. It is rather to say that the opposition between high and popular culture was defined by critics such as Theodor Adorno, and that cinema, which is both and art and an industrial process, invented new American symbolic forms for which this opposition is no longer valid. In Modernism and Popular Music, Ronald Schleifer sheds light on the dichotomous relation between high and popular culture by emphasizing the latter’s implicit political and ethical dimensions. Schleifer extols the performance of popular culture and its leading artists and he quotes Alfred Appel who calls these artists the “‘alchemists of the vernacular’” (Schleifer 2011, 1). It is certainly true that “original cultural forms” such as jazz, the musical, and sports such as baseball “testify to the American genius for the popular” (Kitses 2007, 1), and whoever has spent any time pondering American culture and its historical development must come to the realization that “The Western is one of America’s grandest inventions” (Kitses 2007, 1). Directors such as Ford, Hawks, their national followers such as Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, or Sam Peckinpah, and their international followers from Sergio Leone to Alejandro Iñárritu are indeed alchemists of the American vernacular who have transformed and informed the culture, turning what James saw as the “hard substratum of nature” into the nation’s golden aesthetic and political forms. As even a cursory reading of James’s statements about American culture suggests, aesthetics and politics are closely enmeshed, and they show that the aesthetic is the political, or, that it is through the performance of aesthetics that political performance takes place. In a representative democracy such as that of the US, the role of popular art cannot be overestimated, for its forms “foregroun[d] the dynamics of performance and gesture in the experience of human being” (Schleifer 2011, 1). Critics who find popular genres such as the Western “empty [and] an enemy of art” forget—repress or ignore—that unlike high culture that depends essentially on notation and semantics, popular art depends on performance and prosody. This is why the aesthetic and political forms of high and popular culture are different, and this is why also the latter flourished so remarkably in the U.S. Western movies like the popular music, for they too are “a special case of the popular arts precisely because [they are] a performance art as well as a commercial art” (Schleifer 2011, 33).3 It is worth noting in this context that the rise of American cinema and the rise of the Western is contemporaneous with the phenomenon of popular music that Schleifer analyses, even as it is contemporary with the establishment of many National Parks and National Monuments that enshrined in three dimensions the symbolic forms of American geography celebrated by the Western. And yet like the blues, the Western travels; the transnational mobility of both forms—American music and American cinema—underscores the trace of their origins not 310

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just in the space of their innovation, but in their capacity to engender new contexts of performance. Unlike the need to return to Europe to partake in culture, these forms perform anywhere but always already inform us of the American aesthetic. The performance of art and its relation to iterativity has been one of the main questions of modernism at least since Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Benjamin 2008, 1936). When it can be reproduced ad infinitum, the commercial or poietic value of a work of art no longer depends on its uniqueness, but rather on its dissemination and the possibility of its repetition. This is something that technological development made possible to an unprecedented level in the twentieth century, which saw the commodification of culture by a “new social class of low-middle-class information workers (engaged in the institution of finance capital) possessing an individualist ideology that made certain kinds of material self-fulfillments personally and popularly imperative” (Schleifer 2011, xii). However, the performance of modern art forms “engenders infinitely new contexts” (Derrida 1982, 321). The iterative performance of modern art is thus not merely a repetition of the same, but rather the inaugural performance of symbolic forms that inform the polis where this performance takes place. Following Jacques Derrida, cultural critics such as Judith Butler have shown how the iterativity of cultural forms are central to any given culture to the point of being embodied in the individuals of that culture. Thus, popular arts such as the Western do not merely reflect and commodify the hard substratum of the nature of the nation (to paraphrase James), the spirit of the place, or the psychology of its population. In the best or most ambitious Western movies we see significant cultural forms as much shape the nation as they are produced by it. By informing the nation, they reach far beyond their original goals that include the entertainment of the spectators, viewers, and listeners, the promotion of ideologies and political agendas, the profit of the industries that produced them. It follows that original cultural forms are not only idiosyncratic to regions of the world, but rather that they are “original” because of the relation between what they mean—their semantics—and how they mean—their prosody. This relation, that we may call the “alchemy of the vernacular,” produces inaugural symbolic forms that perform in the space of the culture shapes that space, its community and political bodies. Although Western movies can be, and often have been, read as a (mythopoeitic) reconstruction of America’s past, they are really a site of production of symbolic forms that have informed the present. A number of studies have explored how Western movies have recast America’s past with an aura of myth, and how the industrial power of Hollywood has contributed to the dissemination of these myths. This is an important aspect, and the question of the relation of works of art to their modes of production in the capitalist system of the second industrial revolution cannot be ignored; it cannot even be overemphasized. I wish to underscore that the inaugural symbolic forms that the best Western movies have produced to suggest that they still perform in American culture and inform it. Gilles Deleuze has proposed that cinema “imposes new points of view” on the problem of the classification of signs (Deleuze 2004, 7); the symbolic forms of the Western have been projected into the future—our present—as proleptic allegories that have been informing American culture within its national borders and transnationally beyond these borders. Cultural texts such as the Western are performative speech acts that produce tangible effects in the world. The difficulty in studying them consists in seeing how intangible forms (poetics) produce a tangible performance that affects bodies, lives and communities (politics). Symbolic forms appear to us as tangible signs, but these signs are but the traces of their performance that has been taking place in time and space and has contributed to generating that time and space. Thus, the landscapes of Monument Valley of Ford’s movies are constituted as 311

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the landscapes of Monument Valley by his camera and his poetic followers. The framing of the landscape constitutes it as landscape, even as the movement of the camera and the movement of objects in the frame bring forth symbolic forms that make the Western relevant to the “distinctly American imaginary” (Pippin 2010, 11). Thus, Monument Valley is of course tangible: it is visible, it is material, and it is made of solid Cenozoic rock that has preceded by some 60 million year the stampede of Ford’s cavalry or the rattling on his stagecoach. But the forms that hold it together as a formal symbolic landscape are intangible, just like the mathematical laws that project a three-dimensional perspective on a two-dimensional piece of paper. The symbolic forms of the Western perform the alchemy that transforms rocks, sand, bushes and skies; it imposes what Deleuze calls a new classification of signs and thereby transforms them into significant cultural forms. These forms have constructed in turn the sense of political community of the nation, even as they have constructed the time and space in which this political community is deployed. In his founding essay “The Western; or, the American Film par Excellence” (1953) Bazin proposed that the origins of the genre are “almost identical with those of cinema” (Bazin 2004, 142) and that it was centrally concerned with singing the American national character. Bazin wrote at a time when the mythographic character of U.S. culture and cultural politics had been highlighted by critics such as R.W.B. Lewis or Richard Slotkin. The American Adam (1955) or Regeneration Through Violence (1973) were seminal cultural critique books that insisted that representations of the U.S., and of the American West in particular, were not grounded in ascertainable historical reality, but rather in myths elaborated after the fact and resulting from the confrontation of European settlers’ imaginary with the American frontier. Many travelers and historians have since then brought “a sobering corrective to the ubiquitous and purple prose of the western land and town promoters of the post-Civil War years” (Wrobel 2013, 1). Bazin insists that “the Western was born of the encounter of myth and a means of expression” (Bazin 2004, 142), and Robert Pippin whimsically sums up the question: The Greeks have the Illiad; the Jews, the Hebrew Bible; the Romans, the Aeneid; the Germans the Nibelungenlied; the Scandinavians, the Njál saga; the Spanish have the Cid; the British have the Arthurian Legends. The Americans have John Ford. (Bazin 2004, 224) The question one needs to ask is why did so many European commentators find it necessary to align the Western with European foundational myths. The answer might be that myths like narratives or metaphors travel and when they arrive they assume forms they didn’t have before. They produce something which is new, inaugural and incalculable. It is therefore not surprising that the Western resembles so many other mythopoeic narratives that have preceded it, but by pointing to these similarities one misses the more important point, which is the way in which the Western produces something new and unexpected, something that precisely differs from the mythopoeitic models that precede it. The Western has much in common with the structure of older myths, but even more importantly, it generates new forms that have informed and transformed American culture. In Bazin’s definition of the Western the latter partakes of the mythopoeic character of the nation, and is itself wrapped in myth: to Bazin, the cameras of celebrated directors such John Ford or Howard Hawks had captured what D.H. Lawrence had called “the spirit of the place” (Bazin 2004, 1). At the same time, Bazin proposes a mythic birth for the Western as the result of the encounter of meaning (American myths) and popular poetics (the cinema). Bazin acknowledges that “the Saga of the West existed before cinema under literary or folkloric forms [and] the multiplications of Western movies has not killed Western literature” (Bazin 2004, 219). But cinema is not merely another way of telling a story; it is a new way of 312

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seeing, apprehending and comprehending the world. In something that may sound like a tautology but that has often remained unexplored, Bazin sums up the radical change that Western movies make: “It is easy to say that the Western is ‘cinema par excellence’ because cinema is movement” (Bazin 2004, 218; emphasis added). Bazin’s definition also entailed that the Western deserved to be—indeed, had to be—taken seriously, just as any of the foundational myths mentioned above have been. While nobody takes these myths to be strictly historical, they are recognized for their poietic and performative role in the culture(s) they are a part of. However, when in the 1950s Bazin was vehemently arguing that the Western should be taken seriously, he was really saying that cinema as a form of popular art was worth serious intellectual and philosophical consideration, just like the recitation of the travels of a cunning sailor or the singing man in arms. Pippin thus rightly argues that myths are “about events in the remote past” but that their “decisive significance [is] for the present” (Bazin 2004, 225). Myths bring us characters and set them in narrative as the configuration of the temporal dimension of lived experience, and thus literally create the time and the space in which we live. It is the projection of the narrative of myth into the future, beyond the wall of an ever-fleeting present, that makes their origin inaccessible and turns it into a performative event and a narrative that we access through symbolic forms. That myth should give access to a sense of origin is a particularly sensitive issue for The United States, a new country by historical standards. Although John Winthrop has been called “The American Moses” and Walt Whitman has received the moniker of “American Bard” by reference to Shakespeare, it is apparent that these are only somewhat self-aggrandizing metaphors. America’s “ancient times are not very ancient” (Pippin 2010, 62); the country cannot claim the depth of such historical references as Moses or Shakespeare, and one of America’s “mythic forms of self-understanding … could be said to be the very best Hollywood westerns” (Pippin 2010, 62). American Westerns are, unlike the most ambitious traditional works of arts by which we define an era or a culture as a whole, the depositaries of the symbolic forms that have shaped the nation and extended its power transnationally, precisely because their pastness (even if only a little more than a century) is more remote than the pasts of most cultures. The relation between mythic construction in art and myth was centrally explored in Perspective as Symbolic Form, a very important short book Erwin Panowsky (1925). Panowsky adopted the vocabulary of Edmund Cassirer to propose that the perspective and the perspectival representation of the world was a symbolic form. Perspective, Panowsky proposed, changed the way signs of the world were classified and imposed itself as the realistic and historically accurate representation of the world. He further argued that Gothic cathedrals were the realization in three dimensions of the aesthetics and the politics of the Renaissance: not only did they reflect the world of the Renaissance, but they also contributed to defining it and projecting it into the future. By analogy, one may say that the best American Westerns are the realization of twentieth-century cultural forces, of the past inhabiting the present, and while they reflect the state of the union of the nineteenth-century US, they inform it and project it into the present. We need to bear in mind, then, that Westerns do not only evoke a time and a place in a way that is biased by hegemonic ideology: they create the time and place they appear to simply evoke. The historical period depicted by classic Westerns goes from the end of the Civil War to the official closing by the Census Bureau of the frontier in 1890. Thus, the narratives Westerns evoke have very different locales: it can be the Missouri River as in Howard Hawks’s The Big Sky (1952), the Arizona desert as in Ford’s Fort Apache (1948), or in the arctic cold of the Klondike in Alejandro Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015). In all cases, they are about being on the always already closing frontier. They are not, however, only nostalgic 313

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evocations of a time that is no more, but really about a time that has never come to be, for the frontier is not a separation between or even a conflagration of civilizations, but rather something that is itself constantly moving. Rather than valorizing and stabilizing the ideological hegemony, the most ambitious Westerns put it in motion and deconstruct the white male patriarchal dream of political control of the land and its community. The best movies in the genre portray the transition from a feudal and patriarchal world to a more fraternal—and possibly more feminine—world, not just because that is what they are about, but because of the relation between what they are about and cinema as a means of expression constitutes their very power. As cinema became the dominant cultural form of the twentieth century, the Western reflected the post-Civil War era, even as it shaped the century by inventing the dominant forms of American culture. The other great post-Civil war popular genre is the blues, which captures the freedom of movement of recently emancipated slaves in the “rail-road” rhythms of lyrics and beat. The horse-travel of Westerns rather than the train-travel of the blues nicely demarcates the American racial divide. In any case, the Western did for America what other genres have done at other cultural moments. And just as the international presence of Shakespearean drama is tied to the English empire, so Westerns have spilled over to the globalized world in which America has become dominant. It is difficult to assess how many Western movies have been made because many have gone unregistered or missing, and also because the very definition of what constitutes a Western film is constantly revised. The Western became a prominent filmic genre and a major cultural product even as the US was rising to become the world’s politically and economically hegemonic nation state. Not long before the production of The Great Train Robbery (1903), US Steel overtook all of British steel production, and since the time of the film that opened the era of the Western, the US film and entertainment industry has grown steadily to become the nation’s second export industry, thus securing the US world cultural hegemony and ensuring thereby the performative iteration of the symbolic forms developed by the Western. This aspect is central, for not only has cinema ensured that the US cultural presence has been on a par with its economic and military presence on the world stage, but the Western has also played a major role in the transnational dissemination of the symbolic forms of US culture.4 Among the thousands of Westerns few may have remained as significant works of art; some might be unjustly disregarded for a while before being rehabilitated, most will be forgotten and lost forever. But the miraculous survivors, these “significant works of art,” realize the past of the US, and it is out of that past that our contemporary imaginary has emerged to situate us in the world.5 As such, they bear witness from the past to our future and tell us where and when we live; they tell us also what imagined communities—national, transnational, cultural, religious, ethnic—we belong to. They have outlived wars and natural disasters, changes of taste and oblivion to tell us not about the past in which they were written, but rather about the future, that is, our present.

Notes 1 The inseparably common character of history (and therefore politics) and aesthetics is an ever-present theme in James’s writing, and it is articulated in particular in his 1884 essay “The Art of Fiction” where he writes: The only effectual way to lay it to rest is to emphasize the analogy to which I just alluded—to insist on the fact that as the picture is reality, so the novel is history. That is the only general

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Performance of American popular culture description (which does it justice) that we may give the novel. But history also is allowed to compete with life, as I say; it is not, any more than painting, expected to apologize. The subjectmatter of fiction is stored up likewise in documents and records, and if it will not give itself away, as they say in California, it must speak with assurance, with the tone of the historian (James 2014b, 429) 2 It is noteworthy that any sense of direction in the US is predicated on these cardinal points. When heading for a destination, a map (or the GPS) will give the traveler directions in terms of north, south, east and west; rather than saying go toward the city of town X or Y, the traveler will be told head north or west. It is unsurprising, then, that narratives should follow the same narrative paths. It may even be, as Jean Baudrillard suggests, that “the map … precedes the territory,” and that these narrative paths precede the trails and highways that trace their progress across the north American continent even as they trace the contours of the nation (Baudrillard 2006, 1). 3 Schleifer insists that music is performative in ways that other popular forms, including cinema, may not be. On the other hand, as Schleifer acknowledges, popular music owns much of its performative impact to the second industrial revolution, that is, to the rise of a consuming middle class and the availability of cultural goods such as gramophones, records, or even printed music sheets. While the differences with music that Schleifer shrewdly analyses are significant, I believe that cinema, and singularly the Western, has depended on “performance as [its] primary modality” which, as in the case of music, “underscores the performativity of modernist art forms” (Schleifer 2011, xi). 4 Despite the recession since 2008, what the report calls “the copyright industries” have continued to grow faster than other business segments. The core copyright industries grew an annual rate of 1.1% from 2007 to 2010, and the total copyright industries (and those dependent on them) grew at an annual rate of 1.47%. The overall economy during that period grew only 0.5%. According to the report, copyright industries added over $931.8 billion in value to the US economy last year, which is about 6.4% of the nation’s total gross domestic product. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cop yright-industries-provided-931-billion-economy-256778. 5 Stephen Greenblatt notes, speaking of Shakespeare, that “works of art, by contrast [with] ordinary texts most of which are virtually incomprehensible when they are removed from their immediate surroundings,” contain directly or by implication much of [their cultural] situation within themselves, and it is this sustained absorption that enables may literary works to survive the collapse of the conditions that led to their production” (quoted in Schleifer 2011, 112).

Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006. Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. London: Continuum, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” In Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982. Fiedler, Leslie. The Return of the Vanishing American. New York: Stein and Day, 1968. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Culture.” Critical Terms for Literary Study. Eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. James, Henry. The American. Ed. James W. Tuttleton. New York: Norton, 1978. James, Henry. “Hawthorne.” The Portable Henry James. Ed. John Auchard. New York: Penguin, 2004a. 416–423. James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” The Portable Henry James. Ed. John Auchard. New York: Penguin, 2004b. 425–447. Kitses, Jim. Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood. New ed. London: British Film Institute, 2007. Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: The Viking Press, 1969. Panowsky, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996. Pippin, Robert B. Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. Schleifer, Ronald. Modernism and Popular Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Wrobel, David M. Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013.

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27 BORDER ENCOUNTERS Theorizing the US–Mexico border as transa Jennifer A. Reimer

Introduction In Tijuana, Mexico’s “Colonia Federal” neighborhood, someone has painted the words “EL ARTE TUMBARA ESTE MURO”1 on the side of a house. Beneath the house runs a tunnel that was, until recently, used by smugglers to transport people and contraband across the US-Mexico border. After the tunnel’s discovery in 2004, the house was sold to Tijuana’s Consejo Fronterizo de Arte y Cultura (COFAC)2 to be used as a cross-border center for arts and culture. Run by local artist Luis Ituarte, La Casa de Túnel features gallery and workspace for artists, a store, and a rooftop café/presentation space for music and performances. On a rainy afternoon in February, Luis tells me that they are trying to buy up as much real estate in the neighborhood as possible to start an international artists’ colony. The border, he says, is a part of life and that art goes on; it grows up and around the border. Art may eventually knock the wall down, but for Luis, the US-Mexico border is not something to be overcome or transcended. It is simply to be lived, with conscience and with resistance, each collaborative art practice demystifying the border’s seemingly monolithic strength and rendering it into possibility and future. In a geography that often feels torn apart by the simultaneous, contradictory forces of the national and the transnational, containment and flow, fear and pleasure, projects like La Casa de Túnel in Tijuana reflect the transformative power of culture-making on the US-Mexico border. By turning an underground smuggling tunnel into a transnational cultural center, COFAC, and organizations like it, are speaking back to mainstream representations (in both the United States and Mexico) that portray the international border as dangerous, culture-less, militarized, an export-processing zone, a hedonistic playground for tourists, or a cartel-ridden war zone. These negative representations, the stories they tell and the images they portray, are everyday border encounters on both sides. As an alternative, Fiamma Montezemolo, an Italian anthropologist; Rene Peralta, a Mexican architect; and Heriberto Yépez, a Mexican scholar/writer, declare Tijuana as a “transa” in their photo-textual essay Here Is Tijuana! (Montezemolo et al. 2006, 5). “Tijuana,” they insist, “instead of a city, more often than not, is a transa.” They define transa as 316

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agreement, bribery, business, intention, reflection and project. Transa refers to the illegitimate and what happens on the verge; not only of illegality but also of any non-conventional initiative. It is derived from ‘transaction.’ A transaction within another transaction—this is how Tijuana functions, Tijuana muddles everything up—Tijuana transa. (Montezemolo et al. 2006, 4) Transa may originate in Tijuana, but like so many Tijuanese, it is a mobile, border-crossing word. In transa, we hear the echo not only of transaction but also of transnational, transboundary, and many other concepts that have become increasingly popular in cultural studies of the Americas. Transa describes alternate forms of borderlands representation that are “transa-national” and “transa-genre.” Drawing on Montezemolo, Peralta and Yépez’s use of transa, in this chapter, I explore the varied potential of transa as an alternative border encounter—an approach that theorizes how transactions between the material realities of the US-Mexico borderlands and innovative aesthetics (form) produce experimental, transnational cultural texts.

Tijuanologies In Here Is Tijuana!, the authors use “transa techniques” which connect reader-viewers to a practice of reading-viewing (both text and city) that contests both US and Mexican stereotypes of Tijuana and, by extension, the greater borderlands. The authors “decided the book would have to be a transaction of disciplines and disagreements, a transaction between the many discourses about Tijuana (statistical, literary, academic, popular etc.) and its rich visual cultural [sic].”3 Textual-visual collage, pastiche, and juxtaposition are some of the experimental strategies the authors use to represent the geopolitical and cultural phenomena encountered in Tijuana: free trade, uneven urban development, migration, labor struggles, and urban and folk art, for example. These familiar stories are retold using transa as metaphor and aesthetic strategies to link Tijuana to the transnational and national material realities of Mexico and the United States. The book forces reader-viewers into new ways of “reading” and “seeing” the US–Mexico border that testify to the contradictory power of the US–Mexico border to transgress, and even render obsolete, national boundaries, while also heightening the perceived power and presence of states and cohesive national identities. Transa offers an alternative to hybridity as metaphor for the US-Mexico borderlands. In rejecting Néstor García Canclini’s well-known metaphor of Tijuana as “postmodern laboratory,” Here Is Tijuana! critiques popular hybridity theories (Canclini 1995).4 In Hybrid Cultures, Canclini effectively illuminates how the cultures of the US–Mexico borderlands reflect the larger forces of conflict, change, resistance, and continuity in Latin America. He uses Tijuana as a case study for similar geographies where the transnationalization of markets and migrations creates conditions of cultural crossing. Here Is Tijuana! advances Canclini’s work by arguing that Tijuana, as a transa, cannot be abstracted into what Canclini famously called a “laboratory of postmodernity.”5 Drawing on previous work by contributor Yépez, the authors suggest Canclini’s postmodern laboratory may oversimplify the city’s deviant transas. Elsewhere, Yépez has theorized the US-Mexico border through oppositional forces of “fission.” He argues against hybridity theories that portray the borderlands as the uncomplicated synthesis of two bounded (but always inherently unequal) cultures. He asks us to reconsider what he identifies as the overused metaphors of “happy hybridism” (Yépez 2005, 317

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11). In “Adiós happy híbrido: Variaciones hacia una definición estética de la frontera [más allá del mítico personaje mixto],”6 Yépez declares: “La hibridación como metáfora para describir los fenómenos de contacto en la frontera México-Estados Unidos ha llegado a su fin. La metáfora de la hibridación probó ser ingenua, neoliberal, hegeliana.”7 Yépez argues Canclini’s audiences of academics, artists, authors, and journalists have simplified “su tesis sobre la hibridación y el postmodernismo—quienes establecieron lo ‘híbrido’ como la categoría automática bajo la cual habría que definir lo fronterizo” (Yépez 2005, 12).8 Postmodernism, he argues, has become “Decontextualización Feliz. Happy meal de los discursos.”9 In the postmodern celebration of blurred boundaries, Yépez worries that we have “depoliticized” borders and that we celebrate a Hegelian synthesis of differences “mientras que en realidad observamos todo lo contrario: las fronteras, de ambos lados, se remarcan.”10 Yépez reminds us that “the border reality is much more complex than this metaphor” and the “asymmetric reality of the border demands different metaphors” (Yépez 2005, 14). In sum: “El concepto de hibridación desdibuja tensiones; neutraliza. Y lo que la frontera realiza es transgredir entendidos, cargar intencionalidades: abrir conflictos.”11 Thus, Yépez turns to the physical sciences for different metaphors: “La frontera no se define por su fusion sino por su fisión.”12 For Yépez, images of opposing magnets illustrate the border’s erotic clashes, attraction and repulsion; they represent the fuerza-de-resistencia (force of resistance) that is, finally, his alternative metaphor. The tension of opposing/resisting forces “molds the structures, identities and forms” of the borderlands (Yépez 2005, 35). In Here Is Tijuana, Yépez’s forces of fission become transas, connecting the forms of culture (their aesthetic qualities) to the material realities of the borderlands. For example, the book’s selection and arrangement of photographs and text creates a pointed critique of exploitative labor practices and the deadly ironic gap between the rhetoric

Figure 27.1 (left) Photograph by Julie Orozco Reproduced by permission from Montezemolo et al. (2006, 144). Figure 27.2 (right) Photograph by Tarek Elhaik Reproduced by permission from Montezemolo et al. (2006, 127).

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of globalization, neoliberalism, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the realities free trade imposes on workers. A two-page spread called “Assemblyland” provides a brief history of the Border Industrialization Program (BIP), which is credited with bringing the first factories to the border region.13 Indeed Here Is Tijuana! reports that, with 562 plants, Tijuana has the most assembly plants of any Mexican city (Yépez 2005, 142). The overwhelming majority of assembly plant workers are women. In 1995, 57.2 percent of the total employees of the assembly plant industry of the border states were women (144), who are generally favored due to the common perception that they are innately suited for work requiring little skill and a light touch. In addition to being seen as “nimble fingered,” women are often thought to be less likely to unionize and easier to control (Hu-DeHart 2007, 252; Biemann 2002, 105–106). Images of domination and control are reinforced through photographs taken inside a maquila.14 Figure 27.1, originally a color close-up, depicts women’s hands attached by a cord and wristband to the assembly line they are working. The photo focuses on the bright yellow wristband and emphasizes the continuity between woman and machine. The photo’s perspective reveals an endless line of workers, stretching down the assembly line, in the same way Figure 27.2 depicts a border art installation piece: painted coffins nailed to the border fence, each coffin listing a year and its corresponding number of crossing-related deaths, emphasizing a seemingly endless line of victims. The similar composition of both photographs, and their placement in the same book, uses repetition-with-a-difference as a transa technique to critique the dominant narratives about the US-Mexico borderlands. As we recall the previous photograph while viewing this one, we create a visual palimpsest. This layering technique invites reader-viewers into reflexive dialogue, where both photographs inform the meanings and narratives we see and read into them. Next to Figure 27.1, the authors quote Norma Iglesias: “All of the women had assimilated the fundamental words of being an industrial worker: enter, leave, push, pull, hurry, pull the handle, ‘push’ the button, produce” (Biemann 2002, 102). This lack of separation blurs the distinction between the organic body and machine, contributing to the “technologizing” of women’s bodies and the gradual erasure of their humanity, an erasure finalized somberly in Figure 27.2. The gap between free trade’s happy rhetoric and its brutal realities reinforces the authors’ interest in questions of representation (as “transas within transas”). Without lapsing into oversimplifications and yet paying careful attention to how regimes of representation create real effects for citizens, TV manufacturing emerges as one symbol of the complicated relationship between representation and Tijuana. Several photographs depict televisions in various stages of assembly. These photos are accompanied by statistics: “Since 1989, Mexico has been the first exporter of color televisions to the United States…In 1996 the five television set companies located in Tijuana absorbed 16% of the employment in their area” (Biemann 2002, 146). Indeed Yépez reports that seven out of ten televisions in the world were made in Tijuana (Yépez 2012, 58). In black and white, Figure 27.3 shows a pile of discarded, out-dated televisions half-buried in dirt and stacked in intervals like a staircase rising out of the dump. Next to it, also in black and white, and cropped to exactly the same size: a picture of middle-class rooftops, similarly stacked. The televisions themselves call attention to the ways in which Tijuana, the border, and Mexico are represented through media and cultural forms and discourses, yet the authors use the transas between the images and the statistics—combined with the other forms of textual information on the page—to highlight the disparity between how Tijuana is represented through public discourse and the real-life experiences of citizens and visitors. This particular photograph solemnly captures this tension: the ascending 319

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Figure 27.3 Photograph by Rogelio Núñez Reproduced by permission from Montezemolo et al. (2006, 167).

“staircase” of discarded televisions invokes all the images of the US-Mexico border as seen on TV, while their disposal into a trash heap recalls the worst of the region’s poverty, where assembly plant workers do not earn enough to purchase one of the new color TVs they assemble every day. The juxtaposition with the photo of middle-class rooftops reinforces another transa— the relationship between public and private spheres of representation. The rooftops frame domestic, interior spaces where people come together to participate in social rituals, such as watching TV. Thus televisions also serve as sites where public discourses, images, and representation in general are translated into private, domestic spaces. Both photographs comment on the tension between the public spaces of the working classes (who are often denied the privilege of private, interior spaces) and the private spaces of the middle and upper classes (who get to have interiors). While the rooftops contain domestic scenes, the photo emphasizes their uniform exteriority, and while the old televisions represent a site where public and private spheres collide, here they have been relegated to a public city dump. Adding a final transa to this multi-layered collage, the photos themselves are yet another form of representation, whose construction, composition, and placement on the page are not neutral acts. Here Is Tijuana! uses experimental aesthetic techniques in the composition of the text itself to offer visual-textual transas that not only reflexively mirror the juxtapositions and multiplicity of the city itself but also more effectively represent the specific forces at work in our encounters with the greater US-Mexico border. In particular, by inviting reader-viewers into new ways of 320

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reading-viewing, Here Is Tijuana! dramatically visualizes how images are made meaningful through a range of other discourses (Pink 2001, 131). The book’s innovative combinations of text and image bring multi-vocality and non-hierarchical reading-viewing practices to the traditional text and image, a technique I identify as a transa aesthetic in order to emphasize how specific material realities of Tijuana and the US-Mexico borderlands transact with innovative form. Here Is Tijuana!’s many-voiced, multi-perspective transa techniques question, trouble, contradict, and render visible the complex processes through which Tijuana is represented and encountered. These transa techniques juxtapose both macro- and micro-level transactions to document and expose their mutually constitutive relationships, while also drawing reader-viewers into the process of interrelationship and representation themselves. As the book visualizes a series of transa-border encounters, from the most intimate to the most abstract, the book itself becomes yet another series of encounters that forces readerviewers to reflect on how representation works through culture on the US-Mexico border. Although the authors favor a multiplicity of readings and meanings, the Tijuana that emerges from the book’s pages continually asserts itself, with its unavoidable difference and its refusal to be collapsed into or consumed by the metaphors that would attempt to describe it. Ultimately, the book offers a productive opportunity to draw on the authors’ opening claim of Tijuana as transa and to expand transa’s field of reference from the sitespecific pages of Here Is Tijuana! to a new metaphor for confronting, encountering, and interpreting other innovative cultural US-Mexico borderlands texts.

How a border orders disorder For example, I identify a transaborder poetics in Harryette Mullen’s fourth book of poetry, Muse & Drudge (1995) (Mullen 2006); a long lyric poem “sung” in bluesy, multilingual quatrains that journeys through feminized spaces of the black diaspora, including the US-Mexico borderlands (Reimer 2013). In addition to using Spanish in the text, Mullen references the geography and material realities of the borderlands. I locate a transaborder feminist poetics in the transactions between Mullen’s innovative form, particularly her linguistic sampling and word play, and the corresponding sets of material conditions such multiple discourses conjure. Her use of transa techniques such as fragmentation, collage, allusion, parataxis, code-switching, and signifying invite readers into dizzying, innovative multiplicity where geopolitical and gendered-racialized borders, the subjects who cross them, and the aesthetic borders of culture transact. As Mullen’s poem moves between layered discourses, each layer invokes a set of material geopolitics: slavery’s history, drug trafficking, exploitative labor, urban poverty, sexual and gender violence, racism, and the commodification of culture, for example. The poem calls attention to the presence of borders (as literal and figurative tools of representation and regulation) and attempts to work from the space of negotiation and transaction between them. Themes of hybridity, separation, definition, and regulation are always already gendered and racialized concepts, deeply embedded in the violent histories of racial mixing and mestizaje that are both named outright and alluded to metaphorically by Mullen’s hybridized language. Mullen’s poem travels temporally as well as spatially. In the following quatrain, written in Spanish, Mullen references the colonial history that produced mestizaje: mulattos en el mole me gusta mi pozole 321

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hijita del pueblo Moreno ya baila la conquista (Biemann 2002, 165)15 The quatrain is deceptively playful. The first two lines have a singsong rhythm and rhyme scheme, and the words seem nonsensical: “mulattos in the mole / me gusta mi posole.” However, the third line introduces the “little daughter from Brown town/people,” the result of the conquest’s “dance.” Roughly translated as “and the conquest dances on,” the last line captures the idea of continuity between past and present implied by the Spanish word “ya,” which can translate in multiple ways in different contexts as “already,” “still” or “and.” Mullen plays on the double meaning of pueblo: “town/village” and “community” or “people.” She also takes advantage of the Spanish preposition “de,” which means both “from” and “of.” Thus, the “little brown daughter” embodies the first line’s reference to “mulattos.” The mole and posole cease to be solely iconic cultural markers and instead become symbols of mixing, specifically racial mixing. Mole, a traditional Oaxacan chili and chocolatebased sauce, and posole, a Mexican stew made from hominy, meat, and chili peppers, are both dishes that depend on the combination of different flavors, textures, and spices. In the discourse of mainstream multiculturalism, food and cooking metaphors are often (over)used to describe racial and ethnic heterogeneity (e.g. the tiresome “melting pot”) or even metaphors for people themselves (e.g. Latino/as as “hot” and “spicy”). At first, Mullen appears to be echoing the same kind of essentializing discourse, but the last two lines of the quatrain subvert this discourse and remind us that mixing is the product of the conquest’s violent “dance.” Colonialism’s dance is not over and the consequences of colonial violence continue in contemporary social injustices, she suggests. To peer beneath the surface of Mullen’s seemingly playful rhymes reveals multiculturalism’s silent history—the deeply embedded histories of racial and sexual violence in the Americas. While Mullen’s multiple discourses might often celebrate the complexity and interconnectedness of transnational American cultures, the mulatta is not part of a happy multiculturalism. Alicia Arrizón reminds us that the word “mulatto” comes from the Latin word for mule. It is not surprising that Mullen chooses a little girl to represent colonialism’s racial legacy; indigenous women and girls were the earliest victims of the conquest’s sexual violence. Arrizón notes: “Massive miscegenation was facilitated not only by the social condition of the natives but also by the fact that the conquistadors’ position of power made it possible for them to exploit women at will” (Arrizón 2006, 7). The mulatta is a site of both history and empowerment. In her historical role, she is “the embodiment of transculturation, commodification, eroticization” (Arrizón 2006, 84), perpetually denied full inclusion in both her “native” and “dominant” cultures. Mullen’s mulatta turns this history onto itself by using the “in-betweenness of cultural hybridization” (Arrizón 2006, 101)—a transa—to contest the history of racist, patriarchal power structures. Mullen aggressively makes her art from that transaborder space of marginality. Her muse demands that we “reconfigure the hybrid” (Mullen 2002, 158). This reconfigured hybrid (whether a multi-voiced text or a multi-raced or multi-voiced body) becomes a radical opportunity for “collaborative reading and an occasion to unite audiences often divided by racial and cultural differences” (Mullen 2002, xi). To read Muse & Drudge as a transaborder feminist text means more than simply claiming the text as part of a new, expanded borderlands or African American canon: it opens up multiple critical perspectives that reveal how the text’s diversity performs and models the transnationalism of American cultures themselves. 322

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¡Americano! Transa connects geography to genre in the music of Roger Clyne, lead singer-songwriter for the Arizona-based rock band, Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers. The band’s fourth studio album, 2004’s ¡Americano!, explodes with social-sonic US-Mexico borderlands geographies (Reimer 2014). Transnationalism as a theme unites the album: in the stylistic elements of the music and the geographic location out of which it was produced, in the identities of songs’ characters and stories, and in how Clyne questions the ability of nations, nationalisms, and patriotism to fully capture the depth of human experiences. Clyne’s musical borderlands are a chronotope defined by border crossings that offer new ways of charting contemporary social geographies. He incorporates Mexican musical traditions and fragmented Spanish language into Western American musical traditions (such as honky tonk, country western, cowpunk, American folk, and rootsy rock n’ roll) to create music that slips and slides over the borders of genre and tradition. It’s precisely the music’s inability to be absolutely located that invites us to hear Clyne’s music as a transa, where the borders of national music come against the borders national identities. The music rests provocatively on a central tension between the physical reality of borders and the fluidity of borders as a metaphor for art that reimagines social-sonic identities. As the landscape of his musical genesis and inspiration, Clyne’s music engages the physical borderlands literally. He draws on the region’s rich musical traditions to create a sound that is not quite country, not quite American “roots” folk music, not Mexican norteño, but distinctly regional. In his songs, characters move between the United States and Mexico, their physical border crossings becoming symbols of the other barriers they evade, such as language, racism, or violence. Written by Clyne in Cholla Bay, Mexico in the aftermath of 9/11 and the US second invasion of Iraq, ¡Americano! decries a world at war and advocates the necessity of peace in an age of nativism, separation, and violence. Clyne felt the United States was “awful aggressive, and very, very imperial. And it seemed we had lost compassion and track of the truth, to be frank” (Clyne 2006). Thus, the album intervenes not only with a political message of opposition, but also with an attempt to rediscover and celebrate compassion, truth, and human dignity. In several interviews, Clyne has commented on how ¡Americano!’s conception and birth in Mexico influenced the album’s overall tone and messages. Clyne has said that the album grew out of his sense of America’s failure to live up to its promises to citizens and the world: “I believe in the Constitution and the American ideals. But I’ve got to say I don’t think we’re living up to those things…The album is about being very confused in a very complicated time” (Brown 2004). In Mexico, Clyne says: “I began to focus on where I stood as a citizen and as a man, as a father and as an artist. [Americano!] could be viewed as a proud declaration or as a pejorative” (Lustig 2004). Thus, the album’s transas interrogate what it means to be an American during an imperial war; its crisscrossing sonic geographies asking us simultaneously to consider what music forms this ambivalent “!Americano!” Critic Josh Kun writes that music “can be of a nation, but it is never exclusively national; it always overflows, spills out, sneaks through, reaches an ear on the other side of the border line, or one the other side of the sea” (Kun 2005, 20). Likewise, ¡Americano! testifies to a series of transnational flows and circuits, where cultures converge, conflict, and occasionally coalesce. Check out the gut-busting title track, “¡Americano!,” which Clyne has said is about “awakening to … [sic] individual or national course of 323

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empire” and recognizing the consequences of our actions and taking responsibility for them (Clyne 2006). There is the meditative, existential angst-filled love song, “Your Name on a Grain of Rice,” which probes the limits of national identity and patriotism through individual pathos. Clyne’s gritty anti-war anthem, “God Gave Me a Gun,” is an incisive critique of wars waged on the basis of deeply national-cultural ideologies and the rhetoric that accompanies such violence, followed by the tragic cross-cultural border ballad, “Switchbalde,” (a revised corrido). Ethno-mariachi sounds structure “Mexican Moonshine,” while “Jack vs. José” cheekily displays Clyne’s (fluent) Spanish language skills and interlingual rhyme and word play. As the music crosses borders of nation and genre, creating new musical styles to reflect the transnational identities of the borderlands created out of specific geographic and political conditions of the borderlands, Clyne’s music is a transa. His admittedly more utopic transactions between genre and nation nonetheless envision new possibilities through shared cultural expressions, such as music listening, and point toward a more positive future where borderlands subjects are united in struggle, moving beyond passion to compassion to confront and create new worlds of meaning.

Conclusion Transa, as slippery slang with its deviant connotations, also reminds us that cultural practices, even the most aesthetically innovative or experimental ones, cannot be solely abstracted into new metaphors. Transa as metaphor for US-Mexico borderlands culture continually brings us back to the material realities of the everyday lives of border dwellers and border crossers. The exciting opportunities for transa to enter into other discourses about the US-Mexico border is precisely its inelegant elegance: transa offers a lens of interpretation that embraces the postmodern and experimental but can never be delinked from lived experiences. I propose transa as metaphor for cultural productions of and from the borderlands, not to contain them within neat theoretical concepts but to more fully inhabit them and enliven them with the potentially radicalizing diversity so evident in their experimental aesthetic qualities.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Art will knock this wall down. Note: all translations from Spanish are mine. Border Council of Arts and Culture. Montezemolo et al. (2006, 5). Theorists such as Saldívar, Pratt, Lowe, Anzaldúa, and Bhabha have used various forms of hybridity theory to link cultural studies to specific historical experiences and communities: the colonized female body of the US-Mexico borderlands, the migrant border-crosser, the Asian immigrant, or the global postcolonial subject. 5 In a more recent work, Canclini has rethought the concept of hybridity and his earlier assessment of Tijuana as “one of the biggest laboratories of postmodernity” (Canclini 1995, 233). By including theories of interculturality as part of hybridization, Canclini has remarked that it is perhaps more accurate to call Tijuana “a laboratory of the social and political disintegration of Mexico as a consequence of a calculated ungovernability” (Montezemolo 2012, 94). 6 Goodbye happy hybrid: Variations toward an aesthetic definition of the border (more than the mythic mixed personality). 7 Hybridity as a metaphor for describing the phenomena of contact in the Mexico-United States border has reached its end. The hybridity metaphor proved to be ingenuous, neoliberal, Hegelian.

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Border encounters 8 Yépez argues Canclini’s audiences of academics, artists, authors, and journalists have simplified “his thesis on hybridity and postmodernism, those who established ‘the hybrid’ as the automatic category for defining all things related to the border.” (Yépez 2005) 9 Happy Decontextualizing. Happy Meal of discourses. 10 In the postmodern celebration of blurred boundaries, Yépez worries that we have “depoliticized” borders and that we celebrate a Hegelian synthesis of differences “while in reality we are observing the complete opposite: borders, on both sides, are reinforced.” 11 The concept of hybridity blurs tensions, neutralizes. And what the border accomplishes is to transgress understandings, to overload intentionalities, to open conflicts. 12 The border does not define itself by its fusion, but rather by its fission. 13 BIP was an outgrowth of a larger effort on behalf of the Mexican government during the early 1960s to “beautify” Mexican border towns and attract greater levels of tourism (Nevins 2002, 45). The BIP “established the border zone corridor of export processing industries known as maquiladoras. The stated intention of the program was to create location-specific magnets for economic growth and thus serve as a development engine for the entire northern border” (Nevins 2002, 45). Additionally, the BIP sought to reduce unemployment in border towns (see also Kopinak 2012, 71–93). 14 Maquila is the Spanish word commonly used to refer to the assembly plants (factories) located on the US-Mexico border. 15 I like my posole / little daughter from Brown town (people) / the conquest dances on.

Bibliography Anderson, Jill, and Nin Solis. Los Otros Dreamers. Mexico City: Jill Anderson and Nin Solis, 2014. Arrizón, Alicia. Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Biemann, Ursula. “Performing the Border: On Gender, Transnational Bodies, and Technology.” Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at US Borders. Ed. Claudia Sadowski-Smith. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 99–118. Brown, Mark. “Straight Shooter—Roger Clyne and Band Aim at Love, Sprawl, War, Patriotism.” Rocky Mountain News. April 21, 2004. Canclini, Néstor García. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Clyne, Roger. “Interview by Carl Wiser.” Songfacts.com. San Francisco, CA. February 23, 2006. Clyne, Roger, and Steve Larson, P. H. Naffah, and Danny White. ¡Americano!. EmmaJava Records. 2003. Hu-DeHart, Evelyn. “Globalization and Its Discontents: Exposing the Underside.” Gender on the Borderlands: The Frontiers Reader. Eds. Antonia Castañeda, with Susan H. Armitage, Patricia Hart, and Karen Weathermon. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. 244–269. Kopinak, Kathryn. “Globalization in Tijuana Maquiladoras: Using Historical Antecedents and Migration to Test Globalization Models.” Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border. Eds. Josh Kun and Fiamma Montezemolo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 71–93. Kun, Josh. Audiotopia: Music, Race, America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Kun, Josh, and Fiamma Montezemolo, eds. Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Lustig, Jay. “Crossing the Border for Inspiration.” New Jersey Star-Ledger. April 9, 2004. Montezemolo, Fiamma. “(Conversation with) Néstor García Canclini, on How Tijuana Ceased to Be the Laboratory of Postmodernity.” Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border. Eds. Josh Kun and Fiamma Montezemolo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 94–116. Montezemolo, Fiamma, Rene Peralta, and Heriberto Yépez. Here Is Tijuana!London: Black Dog Publishing, 2006. Mullen, Harryette. “Muse & Drudge.” Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge. St. Paul: Greywolf, 2006. 97–178. Nevins, Joseph. Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the US–Mexico Boundary. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pink, Sarah. Doing Visual Ethnography. London: Sage Publications, 2001.

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Jennifer A. Reimer Reimer, Jennifer A. “¡Americano! Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers Rock the Borderlands of Transnational America.” The Journal of Popular Music Studies 26. 4 (2014): 465–483. Reimer, Jennifer A. “Disordering a Border: Harryette Mullen’s Transborder Poetics in Muse & Drudge.” ARIEL-A Review of International English Literature 45. 3 (2014): 151–183. Reimer, Jennifer A. “Tijuana Transa: Transa as Metaphor and Theoretical Practice for Encountering the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands in Culture.” Journal of Transnational American Studies (2016). Yépez, Heriberto. Made in Tijuana. Tijuana: Instituto de Cultura de Baja California, 2005. Yépez, Heriberto. “Tijuanologies: An Urban Essay.” Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border. Eds. Josh Kun and Fiamma Montezemolo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 47–70.

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28 TRANSNATIONAL AND INTERSECTIONAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE INTIFADA Denijal Jegic´

Introduction In her essay “Intifada, USA,” poet June Jordan remaps experiences of subaltern populations transnationally (Jordan 1998b). Traveling between the United States and the Levant, Jordan voices empathy with and fear for the survival of the Palestinian people, emotionally placing herself alongside an indigenous girl in colonial Palestine: “What will happen to that little girl, that child of Palestine? What is happening to you and me?” (Jordan 1998b, 7) Jordan identifies Black Americans and other minorities as victims of US-Israeli hegemony, extending the responsibility for the ongoing Palestinian Nakba onto the United States. Besides Jordan’s cosmopolitan idea that politically-motivated extermination should affect all of humanity, the identification with the Palestinian girl is based on the recognition of the interrelatedness and interchangeability of particular moments of subjugation. Jordan concludes by translating Palestinian modes of resistance onto US soil: “I say we need an uprising, an Intifada, USA” (Jordan 1998b, 7). By adding the Arabic word intifada to its English connotation as “uprising,” Jordan offers a transnational framework for a subaltern, counter-hegemonic reaction to the very transnationally intertwined conditions that perpetuate subalternity. Jordan’s concern for Palestinian lives is based on intersectional analysis and can be viewed within broader tendencies of support for Palestinians emanating from Black American and (other) Third World spaces. The political, economic, and military supremacy and discursive hegemony enjoyed by the United States and Israel has, at least in the global north, more often than not resulted in the rhetorical transformation of settler-colonialism and genocidal atrocities in Palestine into an alleged diplomatic dispute, a military confrontation between a first-world civilization and a terrorist collective, or a clash of civilizations. Departing from dominant Eurocentric traditions, highlighting the interrelatedness of subaltern statuses, drawing on Black feminist theory and currents of Black American practice of solidarity with Palestinians, and informed by the need to academically intervene into the ongoing perpetuation of settler-colonialism and genocide, this essay will engage with the possibilities of intersectionally and transnationally grounded concepts of resistance by elaborating on a transnationalization of the Palestinian intifada as both a viable decolonial and anti-colonial practice and framework of analysis for Transnational American Studies. 327

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The contemporary transnational colonization of Palestine Palestinians have long been dehumanized and excluded from dominant Western concepts of humanity. They were rendered, as Judith Butler argues, as ungrievable lives, i.e., “those that cannot be lost, and cannot be destroyed, because they already inhabit a lost and destroyed zone” (Butler 2010, xix). Israel’s continuous perpetuation of the Nakba through settlercolonialism which entails routine instances of expulsion, torture, and killings, is based on ethnocracy (Sand 2009, 307) and is characterized by the very fear of Palestinian existence (Jegic´ 2018). Palestinian attempts at both violent and peaceful resistance have been brutally oppressed by the Israeli military apparatus. After Israel had placed itself at the center of the so-called “war on terror,” Israeli incursions into the occupied Palestinian territories were, as Derek Gregory outlines, “designed to turn the Palestinian people not only into enemies but into aliens, and in placing them outside the modern, figuratively and physically, they were constructed as….homines sacri” (Gregory 2004, 187). As the Zionist narrative enjoys a discursive hegemony in the Euro-American sphere, Palestinian de-colonial ambitions have oftentimes been framed as illegitimate in media and political discourse. As Palestine/Israel has a crucial role in Western cultural constructions of identity, colonial policies conducted against Palestinians are inherently transnational, as they are implicitly carried out in the name of the West. As Timothy Mitchell and his colleagues conclude, “Washington supports, funds, and arms many forms of injustice in the Middle East. But only in the case of Israel is the injustice disguised and defended as a moral struggle of the West against the rest” (Mitchell et al. 2003, 1). Widely accepted is the religious-nationalist narrative of the Jewish homeland, i.e.: “Zionism is a product of a ‘national liberation movement’ of the Jewish people; the ‘biblical Israelites’ returning (from the late nineteenth century onwards) to ‘redeem the ancient homeland’ and ‘restore Jewish statehood’ after two millennia of absence and exile”; and the Orientalist narrative of Israel’s Western progressiveness, i.e.: Israel is an “outpost” of Western culture and European civilization in the Middle East, surrounded by an Islamic ‘Orient’. The mega-narrative of Zionism, repeated ad nauseam in the Western media, describes Israel as a “liberal democracy” and the “only democracy in the Middle East.” (Masalha 2015, 44) Such myths have served the US government as justifications to unconditionally support Israel as its ally through which the United States has pursued its economic, geo-political, and religious interest in the Middle East. While capitalist and military flows between Israel and the United States are well documented, Washington’s aggressiveness towards Palestinians simultaneously pleases evangelical radicals, whose visions of “the end times” are embodied in the geographies of historical Palestine. In fact, as the recent relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem clarified, in its approach to Israel/Palestine, Washington has boycotted international law and standardized extremist interpretations of the Bible as guidelines for its foreign policy. Even as Israeli politicians and military leaders openly debate practicalities of a comprehensive genocide of the Palestinian population in “genocidal fantasies” (Blumenthal 2015, 119), the United States uses its diplomatic powers to shield Israel from criticism. Washington’s extremist stance on Palestine/Israel has resulted in the United States’ withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council and the UNESCO, with the country finding itself increasingly isolated on the world stage. It is arguably impossible to draw definite boundaries between US and Israeli policies, due to the “Israelization of U.S. foreign policy” 328

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(Beinin 2003, 126), since the US-supported Israeli settlements in Palestine have become sympathetic frontiers synonymous with US-inflected concepts of homeland and nation, and as the international political elite—beyond the United States and including most of the Arab world—has failed the Palestinians as well, it can also be argued that Palestinians are a contemporary colonized people who are subjugated by a transnational hegemonic system. Consequently, Palestine cannot be comprehended through concepts of “post”-colonialism. Indeed, the “post” would discursively erase the visibility of the contemporaneous character of the colonization of Palestine. The analysis of Palestine as an ever-evolving form of colonization is inevitable for both academic discourse and for the formulation of alternative, decolonial, and anti-colonial futures. Any prospects for a halt to Zionist colonialism has, thus, to be rooted in the efforts of activism, arts, and academia, which have, in the case of Palestine, been the central locations for the articulation of anti-colonial gestures. A peaceful and at times fruitful endeavor has been the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which was initiated by the Palestinian civil society in 2005. Inspired by the successful example of the boycott of South Africa during its Apartheid regime, Palestinians called upon international civil society organizations and “people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel” (BDS Movement 2015), until the latter recognizes Palestinian human rights and complies with international law by inter alia ending the occupation and dismantling the apartheid wall.

Palestine and American studies It is against this backdrop of the exclusion of Palestinians from human rights that the American Studies Association (ASA) has started to formally engage with the question of Palestine. Amplified by the ASA’s endorsement of the academic boycott of Israel in 2013, which was grounded in a commitment to free speech and in “solidarity with aggrieved peoples in the United States and in the world” (American Studies Association 2013), the mainstream in American Studies has initiated the breaking of what Edward Said has reified as “America’s last taboo,” by recognizing Palestine’s centrality to the definition of hegemonic concepts of the American “self.” In response to Israel’s violent reaction to the Great Return March and the United States’ complicity, the ASA’s Executive Committee issued a statement on the responsibility of American Studies to Palestine in May 2018. The resolution asserted: As U.S. foreign policy has empowered Israeli settler-colonialism, it has enabled the devastation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, in Israel, and in the diaspora. As a field designed to track the U.S. domestically and internationally, American studies must be responsible to the links between U.S. foreign policy and the ongoing colonial practices of the Israeli government. (American Studies Association 2018) In stressing the US-supported colonial structure of Palestine/Israel, the declaration attributes a decolonial obligation to the discipline of American Studies. The long absence of Palestine from American Studies had of course been related to the lack of a discussion of settlercolonialism altogether. As Mullen argued in the Palestinian-themed issue of the American Quarterly, silence around Israeli settler-colonialism

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was consistent with absence of scholarship on Native American genocide, the US state’s deterritorialization of indigenous peoples in the Pacific, the Southwest, Africa, and elsewhere, recognition of the United States’ own formation as a settler colonial state, and US support for settler colonial regimes in Australia and South Africa. (American Studies Association 2018, 1077) However, the transnational extension of the uncontested US empire in a unipolar world order has led to revisions of the aims and methods of American Studies. Amy Kaplan formulated in her 2003 presidential address to the ASA that discourses on empire are significant for “mak[ing] the contours of U.S. power more visible, and thus subject to criticism” (Kaplan 2004, 2). Kaplan deconstructed US claims to the exclusive possession of global hegemony, criticizing that the United States “upholds a doctrine of limited sovereignty for others and thus deems the entire world a potential site of intervention” (Kaplan 2004, 6). Accordingly, “those whose dreams are different are often labeled terrorists who must hate our way of life” (Kaplan 2004, 7). The recognition of the transnational dimensions of US hegemony has, thus, made a transnational framework for American Studies an imperative, the necessity for which was proclaimed in Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s 2004 presidential address to the ASA. She claimed that At a time when American foreign policy is marked by nationalism, arrogance, and Manichean oversimplification, the field of American studies is an increasingly important site of knowledge marked by a very different set of assumptions—a place where borders both within and outside the nation are interrogated and studied, rather than reified and reinforced (Fishkin 2005, 20) This premise implicitly stresses the connection between scholarship and activism. As Alfred Hornung has argued, the concept of Transnational American Studies “is by definition political” (Hornung 2005, 68). The political component of academia becomes especially magnified in the case of Palestine, as one cannot accurately analyze contemporary U.S. hegemony, the ideology of Zionism, Israeli settler-colonialism, or ethnocracy without formulating a critique of the very colonial and racist practices which continue to shape the structures of the United States.

Transnational perspectives Long before entering mainstream academia, the decolonization of Palestine has been central to South-South cooperation, Third World articulations, and Black Nationalist ambitions of liberation. Academics, artists, and activists engaging—oftentimes from marginalized positions—with the struggles in Palestine have stressed the obvious interrelatedness and exchangeability of these phenomena, as they have been realized in Palestine and Black America. Long before they were theorized academically, analogies have been used to formulate solidarity and resistance within decolonial and anti-colonial frameworks. For example, June Jordan’s demand for an intifada stems from the conclusion that “a barrel of oil is worth more than any number of Palestinian lives” (Jordan 1998c, 7), pointing to the devaluation of Palestinian life, which is, however, economically and socially linked to the experiences of populations in the broader Middle East and the United States: “Clearly, a barrel of oil is worth more than the safety of the 250,000 young African-American and Mexican-American and Latino and poor white men and women now sweltering on the Arabian desert while 330

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they await God-knows-what horrible and untimely death” (Jordan 1998c, 7). Taking Palestinian-Black analogies as a starting point for the deconstruction of imperial politics and capitalism, Jordan eventually formulates all-encompassing concerns. Black-Palestinian encounters were, in the second half of the twentieth century, instructive in making the transnational dimensions of both groups’ suffering visible. Like the Black Panthers’ agile exchange with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Muhammad Ali’s and Malcom X’s travels to the Middle East, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) domestic dissemination of decolonial knowledge on Palestine, open letters bear witness to the heft of Black-Palestinian solidarity. For instance, “An Appeal by Black Americans Against United States Support for the Zionist Government of Israel,” published in The New York Times on November 1, 1970 (Committee of Black Americans 1970), asserts that “the exploitation experienced by Afro-Americans, Native Americans (Indians), Puerto Ricans, and Chicanos (Mexican-Americans) is similar to the exploitation of Palestinian Arabs and Oriental Jews by the Zionist State of Israel,” hence collapsing any notion of isolated coincidences. The writing identifies the “Palestinian Revolution” as “the vanguard of the Arab Revolution” and as “part of the anti-colonial revolution which is going on in places such as Vietnam, Mozambique, Angola, Brazil, Laos, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.” Thus, the letter attributes symbolic significance to Palestinian resistance. It eventually connects Palestinian decolonial aspirations to Black American struggles: “We call for Afro-American solidarity with the Palestinian people’s struggle for national liberation and to regain all of their stolen land.” In contrast to the seemingly incontestable hegemonic link between the predominantly white US and Israeli political elites, exchange between Palestinians and Black Americans has been made possible through critiques of the nation-state and vision of alternative presents and futures, which were central to both Black nationalism’s and Palestinian nationalism’s traditionally transnational character. This view can be captured through Paul Gilroy’s elaboration on the Black Atlantic, which he defined through the desires “to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity,” which have been “relevant to understanding political organizing and cultural criticism” (Gilroy 1993, 19). It is the post-nation state alternative that has captured Palestine as a symbol for decolonial and liberation struggles transnationally. If taken as transnational categories, both “Black” and “Palestinian” destabilize the premises on which the idea of a national(ist) United States and Israel is built. In discussing the power of whiteness, W.E.B. Du Bois elaborated on the destabilized notion of the Black self that was evident in the double consciousness of being viewed as African and simultaneously actively viewed as not being (white) American. Du Bois saw African Americans as being split between the essential sense of understanding the self and a construction of an identity reflected through the power of the white gaze (Du Bois 1989 [1903], 5). The potential of viewing oneself through the eyes of others is a central point for the analysis of one’s own structurally-imposed difference from the majority population. This double consciousness is another base for the reflection of power relations, which are inherent to the social construct of race, and for the production of knowledge emanating from Black and other subaltern contexts. It can be argued that if double consciousness leads to the recognition of one’s position as a subaltern, it simultaneously provides a framework for the transnational linking to other subaltern populations. As Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa elaborated, Palestinians and Africans are always-already informed about the other’s situation due to their own conditions of suffering. Palestinians would not have to preface their words or prove the righteousness of their 331

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struggle to Africans, who are Palestinians’ “natural allies,” since, as Abulhawa concludes, “there is a kind of liberation that can only come from being a part of the liberation of others” (Abulhawa 2013).

Intifada as resistance Liberation and resistance have often symbolized the continuity of existence in Black and Palestinian contexts, and beyond. What could have come close to a so-called Palestinian revolution were, prior to the BDS movement, the two realizations of the Palestinian Intifada (1987–89; 2000–05). The term itself necessitates clarification. Linguistically, intifa-ḍa (‫ ﺍﻧﺘﻔﺎﺿﺔ‬in Modern Standard Arabic) is a noun derived from the verb intifa-ḍ (‫ )ﺍﻧﺘﻔﺎﺽ‬which translates to “to shake off,” “to shudder,” “to shiver,” or “to tremble.” As an instance noun, intifada then means “a shaking off.” In a political context, it has been used within and outside the Arabophone world to refer to organized Palestinian anti-colonial attempts to “shake off” the occupation from their everyday life. Hence, the epistemology implied in intifada exceeds the common Western understanding of it as merely an “uprising.” Besides English, intifada has entered several languages as a loan-word to signify Palestinian resistance and/or uprising against Israeli occupation. Etymologically, stemming from Arabic, a Semitic, non-European language native to formerly or currently colonized geographies and cultures in North Africa and Western Asia, the modern usage of the word originates from a subaltern space and implies an anti-colonial history. Historically, the First Intifada began in 1987 with Palestinians protesting the occupation and the effects it entailed on their lives, i.e., the absence of human rights, the expansion of colonial policies, land theft, house demolitions, detentions, and apartheid which Palestinians had to sustain while still required to pay taxes and ask Israel for permits for everyday actions. Thus, the intifada was a reaction, or, “a popular response to these drastic pressures. It was a widespread popular uprising consisting of grassroots mobilization of all sectors of Palestinian society, including women, youth, and the elderly, who engaged in public demonstrations and non-violent civil disobedience” (Allen 2008, 454). The intifada served as a reaffirmation of Palestinian existence, and provoked national unity, for example, through the promotion of national products and strengthening of the local economy. Thus, “simply surviving and staying on the land also became a nationalist value” (Allen 2008, 454). The intifada helped raise awareness of the Palestinian plight worldwide due to media coverage and the impossibility for Israel to conceal its occupation or market it as benevolent. Following the First Intifada, the PLO was recognized by Israel in 1993 and granted some access to the global political stage. US-brokered negotiations between colonizer and colonized resulted in the Oslo Accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA). While Palestinians were initially given the hope of a so-called peace process, Israel throughout the 1990s intensified its colonial rule and expedited the construction of settlement, while the PA was increasingly seen as a helpful colonial instrument. As a response to the hopelessness and frustration that emanated from these developments, the Second Intifada began in September 2000 and was violently crushed by Israel, which seized the post-9/11 US-led “war on terror” as an opportunity to frame any Palestinian resistance as terrorism. As Mitchell and his colleagues write, “[a] century-long history of dispossession, expulsion, occupation, and resistance was reduced, once again, to a series of Palestinian acts of terror” (Mitchell et al. 2003, 1). Like the subjugation of Palestinians, Palestinian resistance has always had a transnational character. Particularly given the diasporic nature of the forcibly transnationalized Palestinian people, the transnational dimensions are already inscribed into their visions of liberation. In 332

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the highly unlikely event that the nostalgic idea of the right of return, which was passed by the UN in 1948, would eventually materialize, it would bring (back) a transnational diaspora to a geographically defined area. As Israeli colonialism is ongoing and as Palestinians are still being individually transformed into refugees, the categories of the indigenous inhabitant, the internally displaced and the transnationally exiled are never constant. From being trapped on their own land, Palestinians can rapidly become trapped globally. As Edward Said argued, the (First) Intifada was characterized by two dynamics, an internal one and an external one “in which the Palestinian exile presence has interacted dialectically with regional and international powers” (“Intifada and Independence” 23). In the spirit of the First Intifada, the Palestinian National Council (PNC) proclaimed the State of Palestine at their “Intifada Meeting” in Algiers, in post-colonial North Africa. The declaration of independence was poetically adapted by poet Mahmoud Darwish, and stood out as a progressive document that, according to Said, “spelled out principles of equality, mutuality, and social justice far in advance of anything in the region” (Said 1989, 35). The declaration regulated that a Palestinian and an Israeli state should peacefully coexist in a partitioned Palestine. The document is particularly unique in that colonized Palestinians recognize Israel, a state that has been built on their dispossession. This particular moment exemplifies the ongoing phenomenon of the colonized being required to provide for the colonizer’s security and comfort. It is this phenomenon that transplants bases for new instances of the intifada into the present. Meanwhile, inspired by the Palestinian intifada, Black-American calls for resistance on US soil have again spread through online and offline spaces, especially since the summer of 2014, when Palestinians in Gaza and Black Americans and others in Ferguson became victims of state violence. Israel’s war against the population of Gaza coincided with a surge in US police violence against non-white bodies. The GazaFerguson moment has led not only to a re-emergence of Black-Palestinian solidarity in the United States: activists have highlighted the military and capitalist links between the subjugation of Blacks and Palestinians and the obviousness of the confusion of the socalled wars on terror and on drugs which entails an Israeli-sponsored militarization of US police and a transnational exchange of racist practices. Thus, contemporary Black American human rights movements like #BlackLivesMatter and Dream Defenders have since their emergence included the liberation of Palestine as a vision on their agendas. For instance, the 2016 “Vision for Black Lives” manifesto, published by several Black rights groups, accused the United States of being complicit in Israel’s “genocide” against the Palestinians (The Movement for Black Lives 2016). Although there are obvious genocidal components to both Israel’s ongoing policies and Zionist ideology as such, academia has largely failed to engage with the question of genocide in Palestine/ Israel (Rashed et al. 2014, 8). Thus, #BlackLivesMatter’s transnational and intersectional outlook, in this case, reveals academic deficits. The manifesto calls for joint, transnational struggle, and suggests that the concept of intifada has taken on multiple dimensions that can be defined through the Latin preposition trans, meaning “across” or “beyond.” The notion of trans here has to be comprehended foremost but not only as “transnational.” Through an intersectional approach, the intifada as a concept of resistance can be seen as a transcendence of categories, borders, hegemonicallyimposed knowledge, society, geography, and historiography. The notion of trans can help describe the ways in which subaltern groups can transcend their subaltern position. Transnational linkages of suffering based on analogies of colonialism, imperialism, and genealogies of racist structure can lead to a transnational intifada, if viewed through an intersectional lens. 333

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Intersectionality Particular attention needs to be given to intersectionality as a practice, i.e., “a structural, intellectual and political response to the dynamics of violence, white supremacy, patriarchy, state power, capitalist markets, and imperial policies,” as Cornel West has summarized it (West 2016, viii). Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in the late 1980s, when she studied the connectedness of discrimination based on race and gender, and showed how women of color are marginalized both as women and as people of color (Crenshaw 1991, 1244). Thus, such women experience racism and sexism simultaneously in ways that cannot be captured through an analysis based solely on one factor. Crenshaw’s formulation of intersectionality was a necessary intervention into feminist and antiracist discourses that had largely failed to include the experience of non-white, non-heteronormative, non-Christian, and non-Western women. bell hooks defined the “interlocking political systems that are the foundation of our nation’s politics” as “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” to which white feminism that viewed women as universalized, has significantly contributed (hooks 2010, 1). Crenshaw noted that “[t]he failure of feminism to interrogate race means that the resistance strategies of feminism will often replicate and reinforce the subordination of people of color, and the failure of antiracism to interrogate patriarchy means that antiracism will frequently reproduce the subordination of women” (Crenshaw 1991, 1252). This would concurrently imply a selective choice of what factor one aims at targeting, which again implies a differentiation of factors into various degrees of importance and consequently creates hierarchies. However, as Audre Lorde insisted, “there is no hierarchy of oppression” (Lorde 2009, 219). Lorde formulated liberation as a necessarily collaborative solution and conceptualized community as always-already defined through the existence of difference (Lorde 2009, 95). Thus, Black feminism was radical in that it necessarily connected activism and academia, as one could not apply an intersectional analysis without critiquing white supremacy or calling for its end everywhere. Intersectionality is not only an academic project, as “praxis has been a key site of intersectional critique and intervention” since its earliest articulations, as Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall showed. Their definition of praxis encompasses “a wide range of phenomena” including society- and work-centered movements, legal and policy advocacy seeking gender and racial equality and “state-targeted movements to abolish prisons, immigration restrictions, and military interventions that are nominally neutral with respect to race/ ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and nation but are in fact disproportionally harmful to communities of color and to women and gays in those communities” (Cho et al. 2018, 786). Consequently, theory is necessarily informed by practice and should inform practices of organizing. Approaches that are intersectional and characterized by the notion of “trans-” offer necessary interventions into the study of not only political currents, but also of literary and cultural products. Aesthetics emanating from subaltern and transnational spaces, as expressed for example by June Jordan, cannot be grasped comprehensively without an intersectional approach and a focus on the proclamations of resistance and revolutionary visions. Intersectional analysis and transcending concepts of nation, ethnicity, and religion constitute the very structure to Jordan’s poetry and prose. When Jordan moves geographically between Lebanon, Somalia, and Bosnia within the same paragraph in her essay “Islam and the USA” (Jordan 1998c, 52), she stresses the inherent transnational amplification of particular instances of imperialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. Similarly, in her writings about Lebanon, the author herself identifies with the country based on individual and collective 334

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experiences of racism: “And Lebanon is on the wrong side, just like me, Lebanon is not white” (Jordan 1998a, 140). The formulations of solidarity are tied to deconstructions of political and economic hegemony. Jordan’s writings merge emotional self-reflection with historical facts, statistics and quotes, with the author’s intention to perform a counterhegemonic narrative. In “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon,” for example, Jordan’s discussion of U.S. sponsorship of Israeli violence leads her to conclude that every U.S. tax-payer, including herself, is involuntarily complicit in the killings of Palestinians and Lebanese: Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that / paid for the bombs and the planes and the tanks that they used to massacre your family. (Jordan 1998a, 382) The artist can then not be distinguished from the activist, especially if artists write from marginalized positions and identify as individuals who are women, Palestinian, Black, Muslim, LGBT+, or immigrants. The poetry of Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad and the rap of Palestinian hip-hop group DAM are further examples for autobiographic, activist narratives. These artists use African-originated modes of expression, including oral tradition and spoken word in order to remap their individual struggles on transnational scales. Alfred Hornung defines auto/biographies as “involved in literary, cultural, psychological, legal, or political processes of mediation in which the autobiographer becomes a mediator in intercultural, interethnic, and interracial affairs” (Hornung 2010, xii). Thus, he adds, “the conception of auto/biography as mediation also refers to the bridging of different cultures, especially between the East and the West” (Hornung 2010, xii). The mediation beyond categories of culture, ethnicity, and race is constitutive of the autobiographic narration of artists who transcend discursive limitations and offer dialogue to other groups deemed subaltern. In the performance “Mike Check,” Hammad uses an encounter with a white American Homeland Security officer to discuss the history of U.S. apartheid and the Indigenous American genocide (Def Poetry 2011). In the rap “Mali Huriye—I Don’t Have Freedom,” DAM deconstruct the US-Israeli alliance with a Palestinian-Indian American analogy, claiming that the United States is “[c]leaning the Middle East of its Indians / Hitting us then blaming us.” Disseminating knowledge that was produced from within subaltern contexts, such literary products oftentimes result in the artist-activist’s demands for a revolution in forms of a trans-intifada. The extension of decolonial discourses necessitates an engagement with political and economic currents and with the state of human rights informed by intersectional practice and transnational outlook, as it has been applied by these artist-activists. As the ASA’s Executive Committee outlined in its latest statement on the oppression of Palestinians, “[b]ecoming informed and sharing knowledge … while insufficient alone to halt state-enacted or statesanctioned violence, are necessary to defunctioning the regimes that rationalize and use such violence” (American Studies Association 2018). It is imperative that any notion of knowledge includes subaltern and Third World knowledge. In order to de-function violent hegemony, and to highlight gestures towards resistance and liberation, Transnational American Studies needs to further engage with these phenomena through the inevitable combination of intersectional and transnational approaches. 335

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Bibliography Abulhawa, Susan. “The Palestinian Struggle Is a Black Struggle.” Electronic Intifada. June 11, 2013. Allen, Lori. “Getting by the Occupation: How Violence Became Normal during the Second Palestinian Intifada.” Cultural Anthropology 23. 3 (2008): 453–487. American Studies Association. “Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions.” December 4, 2013. American Studies Association. “Executive Committee Statement on the Responsibility of American Studies to Palestine.” May 29, 2018. BDS Movement. “Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS.” July 9, 2015. Beinin, Joel. “The Israelization of American Middle East Policy Discourse.” Social Text 75 21. 2 (2003): 125–139. Blumenthal, Max. Ruin and Resistance in Gaza: The 51 Day War. New York: Nation Books, 2015. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2010. Cho, Sumi, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall. “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis.” Signs 38. 4 (2013): 785–810. Committee of Black Americans for Truth about the Middle-East. “An Appeal by Black Americans Against United States Support of the Zionist Government of Israel.” New York Times. November 1, 1970. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43. 6 (July 1991): 1241–1299. DAM. “Mali Huriye —I Don’t Have Freedom.” Damrap. n.d. Def Poetry. “Suheir Hammad: Mike Check.” Online Video Clip. YouTube, February 21, 2011. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin, 1989[1903]. Fishkin Fisher, Shelley. “Crossroad of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies - Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004.” American Quarterly 57. 1 (March 2005): 17–57. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Gregory, Derek. “Palestine and the ‘War on Terror.’” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 24. 1 (2004): 183–195. hooks, bell. Understanding Patriarchy. Louisville: Anarchist Federation, 2010. Hornung, Alfred. “Auto/Biography and Mediation: Introduction.” Auto/Biography and Mediation. Ed. Alfred Hornung. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, Winter, 2010. xi–xviii. Hornung, Alfred. “Transnational American Studies: Response to the Presidential Address.” American Quarterly 57. 1 (March 2005): 67–73. Jegic´, Denijal. “The Fear of Palestinian Existence.” The Palestine Chronicle. April 3, 2018. Jordan, June. “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon.” Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan. Eds. Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon, 2007. 380–382. Jordan, June. “Eyewitness in Lebanon.” Affirmative Acts: Political Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1998a. 139–142. Jordan, June. “Intifada, USA.” Affirmative Acts: Political Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1998b. 5–7. Jordan, June. “Islam and the USA Today.” Affirmative Acts: Political Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1998c. 52–54. Kaplan, Amy. “Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, October 17, 2003.” American Quarterly 56. 1 (March 2004): 1–18. Lorde, Audre. “There Is No Hierarchy of Oppression.” I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde. Eds. Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 219–220. Masalha, Nur. “Settler-Colonialism, Memoricide and Indigenous Toponymic Memory: The Appropriation of Palestinian Place Names by the Israeli State.” Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies 14. 1 (2015): 3–57. Mitchell, Timothy, Gyan Prakash, and Ella Shohat. “Introduction: Palestine in a Transnational Context.” Social Text 75 21. 2 (2003): 1–5. Mullen, Bill V. “Throwing Stones in Glass Houses: The ASA and the Road to Academic Boycott.” American Quarterly 67. 4 (December 2015): 1075–1083. Rashed, Haifa, Damien Short, and John Docker. “Nakba Memoricide: Genocide Studies and the Zionist/ Israeli Genocide of Palestine.” Holy Land Studies 13. 1 (2014): 1–23. Said, Edward. “America’s Last Taboo.” New Left Review 6 (2000): 45–53. Said, Edward. “Intifada and Independence.” Social Text 22 (Spring 1989): 23–39.

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29 GUAM, UN-INC.; OR CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ’S TRANSTERRITORIAL CHALLENGE TO AMERICAN STUDIES AS USUAL Mary A. Knighton

There must be two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land. Mark Twain, To the Person Sitting in Darkness (1901)

Introduction The poem maps (“poemaps”) of Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez (b. 1980) interrogate configurations of US literary history from the perspective of insular cases rather than that of the continent, and from the Pacific island of Guam (Guåhan), in particular. In dramatizing in textual/visual ways that Guam has been excised, excerpted, or forgotten in US history— quite literally “unincorporated” into national memory and the body politic—Perez’s poetry shares the satirical sentiments of Mark Twain’s narrator in the epigraph above in invoking what counts as “the Business” under imperialism. Perez’s experimental poetry together with his academic scholarship and everyday activism on behalf of indigenous people disrupts business as usual for literary mapmaking in American Studies. Even an otherwise quite daring anthology, Greil Marcus and Wernor Sollors’s A New Literary History of America (Marcus and Sollor 2009), acknowledges the islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines gained from the Spanish-American War in America’s “new” history of literature, but conspicuously forgets Guam. “Conspicuous absence,” it turns out, has defined Guam’s history. As spoils of that same war and vital to US Pacific frontier expansion, Guam and its Marianas archipelago played an outsized role in modern US history. Four hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, memorialized in President Roosevelt’s words as “a date that will live in infamy,” Guam’s bombing by the Japanese occurred—and yet it has been largely forgotten. Moreover, together with nearby Tinian and Saipan, Guam was “liberated” from 338

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Japanese wartime occupation during the summer of 1944 by US forces only to become part of the military staging area in the Pacific from which the Enola Gay would take its atomic payload to Hiroshima from Tinian a year later. Most recently, in 2017, international media trained their sights on Guam after North Korea targeted it with bombastic claims of hitting the US with longrange nuclear missiles, leading mainland Americans to ask what and where is Guam. CNN interviews with University of Guam faculty and government officials in Guam patiently intoned the facts: Guam has been a US territory since 1898, except during wartime Japanese occupation; its Chamorro and Guamanian inhabitants are US citizens but do not have all the US Constitutional rights and protections granted to other citizens even though it patriotically contributes more of its population to the military than most states. That the US history of Guam should remain such a blind spot for Americans hardly bodes well for what US politicians like to call our new “Pacific century.”1 Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez experiments with poetic forms to try to articulate the gaps and contradictions of Guam’s absent presence in US history, contesting its persistent exclusion from America’s narrative of itself. He mobilizes new insular modes of representation to unsettle the sedimentary layers of knowledge in the archives of America’s continental past. To raise the question of Guam in its Pacific and archipelagic context means to reconsider the representational work that literary anthologies do; after all, one task that Perez sets for himself is to curate the unheard voices of diasporic Chamorros and Guamanians. Guam’s historical background and contemporary island life also serve as the topos for Perez’s series of poems from unincorporated territory (Perez 2008–2017), where “island” emerges as a theoretical and geopolitical concept beyond the geographical alone, challenging with irony the insularity of continental thinking. While we might wring our hands at how the inevitably bounded nationalist literary project that is “American Literary History” might better mind its transnational and world history linkages, Perez’s poetry enacts what he theorizes, which is the possibility of writing and thinking “transterritorially” and oceanically (Perez 2015, 620). His project goes beyond merely remapping national literature in ever “new” ways to aim, more radically, at steadily unmapping it; only by unmapping, his work suggests, will we recognize the préterrain of circulation routes, translation, and nodes of conflict and exchange that shore up just what the objects, and objectives, of a new archipelagic literary scholarship might be.

The deep strata of Guam’s archipelagic history Guam’s archipelagic reality locates it 13 degrees north of the equator, the largest and southernmost island of the 15 islands in the Mariana Islands chain. Part of a larger arc of mountains and the world’s deepest trenches, including the Marianas Trench, Guam’s archipelago extends 500 miles north to south in Micronesia. Guam’s size, population, topography, and deep protected harbors have long made it a strategic landfall site in its part of the Pacific. Guam’s human history begins in the uncharted “before times” of Austronesian seafaring ancestors (taotaomona). Guam’s indigenous people are known as Chamorro (or Chamoru), now a mestizo people from the original Chamorro and Carolinian islanders in the region that mixed with the Spanish. Ferdinand Magellan landed on Guam in 1521, then Spain claimed Guam and the Philippines as its first Pacific colonies around 1564. One of the world’s longest continuously held colonies, Guam was successively occupied by Spain, the US, Japan, and then the US again. While Guam’s US history begins in 1898, it was the Insular Cases (1901– 1922) that shaped America’s peculiar colonial clasp on Guam. In these cases, the US Supreme Court decided how to handle the new territories gained from the Spanish-American War, and whether or not a possession was on the “incorporated” path to statehood. The term 339

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“insular” for these cases refers to a distant, unique island home that makes the indigenous people, like exotic fauna or flora, resistant to adaptation, cultivation, or education elsewhere; paradoxically, “insular” also proclaims these islands as fully “inside” the US fold, fully the nation’s own internal matter to do with as it wishes. The Insular Cases described the Chamorros as “natives” and “primitives,” by definition foreclosing their assimilation—asserting, in effect, that Chamorros could never become Americans, and Guam as a colonial territory could never attain statehood.2 Hsuan Hsu reminds us of the distinction historically drawn between Pacific Islanders and Asian Americans: unlike Asian Americans, treated as foreign nationals associated with immigrant countries, Pacific Islanders have long been separated as indigenous and exotic territorial natives, illegible and unsustainable outside of local island habitats (Hsu 2012, 281–283). In fact, just as they do for parks or endangered species, it is the Department of the Interior, Office of Insular Affairs, backed up by Navy and other military branches based on Guam that adjudicates the island’s federal affairs. As the Cold War got underway and wars in Korea and Vietnam heated up, Guam’s fate, along with occupied Japan and Okinawa, was to become America’s military launch pad. The timing was right for Guam’s politicians to push back against the US and demand more as the island became more militarily important. Qualified progress arrived for the people of Guam with the 1950 Organic Act and their gain of US citizenship, but it came at a cost: continued territorial status, rejection as an “incorporated” part of the US, and non-voting representation in Congress. In an ironic repetition of Magellan’s disparaging term for Guam as the “Island of Thieves,” US law made its new US citizens ineligible to vote for US presidents, disenfranchising them as if they were convicted felons. The Insular Cases overlap rhetorically with the post war Organic Act. While the language of “organic” suggests a natural, evolving unity, in reality, the US created a very particular “island” of its own out of Guam: now US land held by Guam’s citizens, it can be legally seized eminent domain fashion for US economic and national security interests at any time. Indeed, while the US granted citizenship and limited Constitutional rights to Guam’s people under the Organic Act with one hand, with the other it promptly took away some 36% of Guam’s land for the US military. It would take a poet to do justice to the absurd contortions the language and the law have gone through in order to deny Guam and its people their voice in US history, to capture their simultaneous belonging and alienation.

Remapping the “new” in American literary studies As a chronological construction of the national history via “literature” in the broadest sense, Marcus and Sollors’ A New Literary History begins typically enough with America literally on the map and concludes with the radical silhouette art of Kara Walker’s response to Obama’s recent election. Rather than including Thoreau or Dickinson simply in their own words, as most anthologies and literary histories do, A New Literary History tasks contemporary writers, scholars, and artists to explicate these works’ significance, interpolating amidst their essays visual images and diverse texts of advertising, music, material and popular culture. It is as if the editors wanted to give readers a more dynamic lecture series as well as an alternative sensorium by which to experience history first hand. It is the oversight at 1898 on the anthology’s timeline that might give us pause. Yet again, Guam appears to be erased from America’s story. At 1898 on the timeline in A New Literary History of America we find Amy Kaplan’s “Literature and Imperialism” discussing Stephen Crane’s war journalism in Cuba as a vehicle for re-examining US empire, educating readers on how Guantánamo came to be US territory (Kaplan 2009, 444). Her subject 340

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matter—a military base on another country’s island become US territory—points to Guam, however unwittingly and indirectly. Perez himself has written about Kaplan’s work on Guantánamo, noting that she appears unaware that Guam was once considered for the role that Guantánamo would play post-9/11 (Kaplan 2009, 102). And in Guam’s neighboring archipelago, Palau has in fact become a relocation site for Muslim Uighur detainees freed from Guantánamo after years of mistaken imprisonment (Lim 2009). To her credit, when Kaplan opens her rhetorical aperture to a larger view of empire in her concluding section, claiming 1898 was a turning point not only in Cuba but also for widespread support of the violent US annexation of the Philippines and the bloody three-year war that ensued, her example of Twain’s Pacific turn in his anti-imperialism efforts wrenches our reading focus away from Cuba and toward the new Pacific frontier beyond the continental US. The USPhilippines War (1899–1902) serves as a startling reminder that the US acquisition from Spain of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam in the 1898 Treaty of Paris was neither benevolent in intent nor welcomed by Pacific Islanders. Perez, who elsewhere borrows Vincente M. Diaz’s Austronesian seafaring terms for poetic and theoretical ends, might well call this kind of unexpected citing/sighting of Guam via the Philippines in Kaplan’s text about Cuba, a combination of etak and pookof: …etak, or “moving islands,” [is] “a technique for calculating distance traveled, or position at sea by triangulating the speed of the islands of departure and destination with that of a reference island. This is accomplished, furthermore, by plotting these islands’ courses in the celestial sky.” Another important seafaring technique is pookof…. If you see a bird associated with a certain island, then you know that island is nearby—the island has figuratively expanded. (Perez 2017, “Guam” 100–101) The Philippines, together with Cuba, function to triangulate our path via Kaplan’s reference islands in the text and guide the reader to Guam, far beyond the ken of her essay. Guam’s submerged history breaches here, as our gaze turns toward the Pacific and the Philippine islands to which Guam has long been historically tied through Spanish conquest and modern immigration. Moving and expanding islands, in Perez’s formulation, help us to locate Guam at material and discursive points despite textual erasure, as the navigation tools he forges detect Guam’s absent presence in histories of the US and its literature. Guam (dis)appears in US history at the interstices of the remapping of US history that Wai Chee Dimock calls “deep time,” a tangle of world roots and transnational routes of convergence and contact that gives the lie to constructed national histories on any anthology’s linear timeline (Dimock 2006). Although Dimock may skew her rhetoric towards continents in advocating transnational methodologies, her richly complicated model of a comparative praxis for world literary history joins forces with Gayatri Spivak’s notion of a planetary literature skeptical of national frames.3 Their work helps us see how insularity is sometimes negative, but not always about islands alone; certainly, it is just as characteristic of nations that place themselves at the center of the world map and world literary history, claiming universal provenance for English only, or self-made origin myths backed up by Providence, and futures propelled by Manifest Destiny. Perez’s poetry about Guam implements Dimock’s deep strata approach to world time and events, as it everywhere draws the cultural, linguistic, historical, submarine, subterranean, and aerial ligaments that imbricate Guam in the world’s “deep time,” past and present. For Perez, “no island is an island because any island is itself an archipelago” (Perez 2017, “Guam” 98). In their challenge to literary history anthologies, Brian 341

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Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens’s Archipelagic American Studies collection decontinentalizes transnational studies in their archipelagic framing, and it is hardly surprising that one of their contributors is Craig Santos Perez. Moreover, Perez himself brings other Pacific Islander voices to world literature. His 2017 edited collection with Brandy Na-lani McDougall, Home(is)lands: New Art and Writing from Guåhan & Hawai’i, published by his own ALA press, creates space for new writers and artists. These texts rock the boat of conventional stories told uni-directionally about the Pacific islands and their people “discovered” or erased on timelines of American literary history.

Locating a moving island: Craig Santos Perez’s “poemaps” of Guam Throughout the four volumes of from unincorporated territory—[hacha] or Chamorran for “one”; [saina] or sakman, an outrigger canoe; [guma’] as “home”; and [lukao] for procession—Perez weaves together diverse poems to create an open container, a net (talaya) that captures in a temporal experience many voices from past and present, in multiple languages and across space and time. A quick glance at this series and one sees a collage of maps, definitions, and advertising slogans to present the modern story of Guåhan and its people’s lives and cultures. His emphasis on “from” in his series titles, as well as in recurrent subtitles threading across his books, recalls the language of departures, sorties, and migration as he describes his overall project in his first volume: These poems are “from unincorporated territory.” They have been incorporated from their origins (those “far flung territories”) to establish an “excerpted space” via the transient, processional, and migratory allowances of the page. Each poem carries the “from” and bears its weight and resultant incompleteness… In the ocean of English words, the Chamorro words in this collection remain insular, struggling to emerge within their own “excerpted space.” These poems are an attempt to begin re-territorializing the Chamorro language in relation to my own body, by way of the page. (Perez 2008, 12) Perez’s poems incorporate his personal story into Guam’s “excerpted” history, and “re-territorialize” the languages, life, and cultures of the Chamorro people in his text from multiple directions at once, with floating visual arrays of foreign words, graphic maps, diagrams, botanical renderings, and geographic survey sites. Just as Paul Lai richly explicates the “discontiguous” ways that Perez’s Guam belongs to the US while resignifying what insular world geography looks like, Perez himself refuses to bound Guam by its tiny island perimeter but renders it continuous—that is, archipelagic—with other islands in Oceania and their topotropes. Never simply imagistic, Perez’s typography and layout evoke both movement and transience, as critics invariably note: lines of words across swathes of a page’s “oceanic” white space mimic the ebb and flow of tides, tugging at history as memories get shored up, then are submerged again. For an indigenous and diasporic people represented by the poet himself, writing from California or Hawai’i, whose Chamorro language, culture, and history have been systematically destroyed when not eroded and lost over centuries, these lines trace halfremembered words and rituals. In one repeated thread, “from All with Ocean Views,” Perez juxtaposes often amusing travel copy of exotic tropical paradise Guam as one big resort that the Guam Visitors Bureau peddles to the world (“Where America’s Day Begins”) with a 342

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footnote-like text offering sharp contrast to that paradise: beginning in boldface “guåhan is,” the gray-toned text fades out with news reports of paradise’s dark underbelly of toxic dump sites, unexploded military ordnance, buried canisters of mustard gas, and contaminated waters. Another refrain across his books exploits the inexhaustible humor of SPAM, whose “mystery meat” and acronym stand for everything Perez might cynically or hilariously conjure forth; what it always represents, though, are the long-term consequences of the US military’s reshaping of Guam’s culture and the very bodies of its people fed unhealthy processed foods. As incantatory in its mobile visual forms as in its lyrical lines, Perez’s extended poem to Guam in these four books incorporates a gentle and repeated return to the body and voice of his aging and ailing grandmother, a body marked by a long island life of sun and salt air on Guam, and a voice full of Guam’s and his own family’s stories as nothing less than Guam’s history itself. Her inevitable decline and impending loss raises the specter of the dwindling numbers of Chamorros, now no longer a majority on their homeland, displaced by what John Carlos Rowe describes as both the drastic and everyday forces of “settler colonialism” that “remove” and alienate native peoples from their own homelands (Rowe 2017, 214). As the grandson poet who has left Guam, Perez himself begs the question of Guam’s future, and mourns his ailing grandmother’s body as it links up to images of the island increasingly associated with extinction, loss, and abandonment (such as the achiote plant). Leaving Guam at 15 for school in California, Perez records by his last book of poems his own diasporic status as it continues now on Hawai’i, weakening further his day-to-day ties to his original home. In [lukao], he dedicates large amounts of dialogic space to his wife and his parents talking story, organizing the book overall around the birth of his daughter whose photo appears in collage on the cover. More explicitly autobiographical here, Perez writes Hawai’i into his paean to Guam, weaving his extended family’s cross cultural domestic ties as archipelagic family roots; meanwhile, Guam shifts increasingly out of central focus in sharing textual terrain with Perez’s larger diasporic Pacific Islander politics, identities, and allegiances. In the “poemaps,” or poem-maps designed together with Donovan Ku-hio- Colleps that open from unincorporated territory [lukao] (Perez 2017), computer-generated images appear above short texts about, for instance, Guam as the hub for the concentration of undersea telecommunications and internet cables crisscrossing the Pacific. Perez riffs here on Marshall McLuhan’s well-known point that the medium is the message, and not only for his poetry in the diverse discursive forms it assumes but also for Guam, whose invisibility is ironically defined by vital coordinates that bring the world’s people together via telecommunications and air travel relays through Guam. Perez’s second volume, from unincorporated territory [saina] (Perez 2010) is particularly multilingual and multi-voiced, suggesting that ignorance of languages and cultures maps history as surely as do world literature anthologies written only in English. [saina] drifts through the languages of Chamorro, Spanish, English, and Japanese, the languages of the colonizers and colonized, all swirling in a history where their referents sometimes anchor them and sometimes find no translatable equivalent. At times, neither author nor grandmother know or perhaps ever knew the Chamoru words, and this loss too is recorded in Perez’s texts as undefined entries, bracketed terms left open on one side. Everywhere, loss haunts these poems. The stranded driftwood of some lines are set apart, evoking extinction and abandonment, with others gently moving left to right and right to left in a tug of tides. Loss serves as both ballast and buoy for a resurgent spirit, as hints of Chamoru nationalism challenge US hegemonic culture and political power but also create divisions among Guamanian migrants and immigrant communities on island for generations now. 343

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Interpolated statistics, charts, data, and news accounts document the ravages of modernization, industrialization, and militarization on Guam’s traditional indigenous culture, which sharpens Perez’s poetry and lends credence to his activism in the face of neo-colonial policies regarding Guam as a modern-day colony. In 2008, Perez went to the UN Special Political and Decolonization Committee in New York to testify on behalf of the Chamorro people’s desire for self-determination. His and others’ testimonies appear as the running footnote to one poetic thread in all the books of from unincorporated territory, the words typographically struck through with a single line as if unheard, as if testimony redacted by a Sovereign’s hand. In an era when colonial possessions and territories should be non-existent in accord with UN condemnation and global decolonization movements following World War II, 17 such cases including the US territory of Guam still exist worldwide. This contradicts insistent US rhetoric of democratic self-determination and anti-imperialism. Even the conservative military historian Robert F. Rogers points out this untenable contradiction at the end of his history of Guam, Destiny’s Landfall. At the very least, Guam serves to dramatize the military expansion of US bases in the Pacific and across the globe as a process of creating pockets, or islands, of extraterritorial jurisdiction on other peoples’ lands. As East Asia historian Chalmers Johnson stresses in his Blowback trilogy (Johnson 2000), US bases in foreign countries constitute a dramatic form of modern US imperialism, an expansionism that requires the making of new “islands.” Pacific neo-Cold War geopolitics continues to articulate the region’s geography, as the US competes with other nations to dominate the oceans and seas, building up military “islands” on islands whose expanded littoral boundaries 200 miles out into the sea ultimately blur the lines between topography and tropes. Neo-Cold War thinking contributes to a perverted US “archipelogic.” In such a logic, chains of US bases serve as extraterritorial “islands” on islands, as in the case of massive bases on Guam and Cuba, linked to landlocked island bases in foreign countries such as Okinawa and Japan. US bases expand US territory all over the globe while challenging the sovereignty of the nations whose land and laws they usurp in the name of the world’s security. The military archipelogic requires these islands as mobile and shape-shifting “geostrategic necessities,” with little concern for how the political economies of bases wreak havoc on the societies and cultures around them.4 Chalmers Johnson derides US expansionism via its military bases as an insidious form of twenty-first-century American Empire, proclaiming Okinawa as “Asia’s Last Colony” (Johnson 2000, 34). Guam, however, is America’s colony, shares the Asia Pacific, and has more than a little in common with Okinawa these days. After all, Okinawa too was once its own Ryukyuan Kingdom before being annexed by Japan; now, it shoulders the burden of some 75% of all of Japan’s US bases on a land mass less than 1% that of Japan as a whole. Guam and Okinawa have a shared plight: geopolitical exploitation of their vulnerable island status and limited resources by the massive political economies and military interests of Japan and the US.

Unmapping into the Préterrain: Guam’s (sub)aerial roots With a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in Comparative Ethnic Studies, and now Associate Professor of English at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, Perez alludes as readily to Charles Olson or Ezra Pound and critical theorists as to folk culture in his poemaps. The ethnographer’s eye, though, unsettles his vision when he is both subject and object of that gaze. James Clifford’s concept of préterrain, as the “fore-field” of material and other conditions that allows ethnographers access to an object of study, appears throughout 344

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[saina].5 Perez weighs carefully how he gains his access to this subject matter and his right to speak for and of Guam. Tongan writer and social anthropologist epeli hau’ofa articulates an oceanic préterrain in his essay “our sea of islands.” He argues against the colonial perspective that the pacific islands are small, tiny, remote, isolated, poor, dependent, deficient, or confined—a perspective based on imperial desires to see only extent land surfaces, only the closed insular island. Hau’ofa draws our attention to an oceania, preoceania, and transoceania surrounding islands, below the waves, and in the sky – a deeper geography and mythology…. (Perez 2010, 63–64) Here Perez stresses the “deep time” of archipelagic thinking, as his poetics unmaps continental bias into its oceanic préterrain. In recent critical essays, he has taken this a step further, speculating about transterritoriality as an alternative to transnationalism. Transterritoriality radically reclaims all land equally for all life on our small island planet, a terrapelago co-opted too long by imperial nation states. Finally refusing the divide between the political and the aesthetic—indeed, defining himself as a Chamorro poet that makes that impossible—Perez explicitly unmaps the préterrain that makes space for his poetic and critical voice when so many others remain unheard, their languages languishing or extinct. For Perez, Guam is not simply a victim of the US, Japan’s, and Spain’s colonial predations and its future is not defined by that past; rather, as Perez’s joint projects in poetry and activism suggest, a new generation on Guam is organizing to resist the military build up coming with Japan’s base realignments and troop movements from Okinawa and elsewhere to Guam.6 More educated, activist, and diasporic, this new generation’s ties are conceptualized in Perez’s figure of the banyan tree, that ancient home of the taotaomona and duende (ancestral ghosts of Chamoru folk culture). Revising Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of submerged rhizomes, Perez’s “(sub)aerial roots” forge archipelagic ties from Guam to California to Hawaii to Okinawa. Perez’s poetry lays bare an oceanic préterrain that unmaps Guam and the poet’s relation to it, exposing its neocolonial neo-“island” reality and his own diasporic displacements. In doing so, US hypernaturalization of Guam’s “insular,” “organic,” and “primitive” island ontology and obfuscation of the militarized “island” base that it is creating of Guam for its own ends come into view. Such exposure may enable Chamorros and Guamanians alike to join Perez in re-imagining their own i/land identities as well as moving the topotropic island’s coordinates to a new place in not only political discourse but in US literary history.

Notes 1 Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used this term, while President Barack Obama memorably referred to the “pivot to Asia.” 2 See Jessica Warheit’s documentary film, The Insular Empire: America in the Mariana Islands (2010), which features interviews with former Guam politicians as well as activists on all sides of the politic debates for Guam’s status quo or change to commonwealth, statehood, or independent status. 3 Brian Russell Roberts, for one, cautions against a rhetorical bias against continents in transnational studies discourse, and against islands with some uses of “insular.” See Roberts (2015,130). 4 This term belongs to Colleen Lye, cited in Hsu (2012, 282). This is part of Lye’s analysis of how East becomes a new West, or frontier, in US history. See Lye (2004, 10). 5 Originally French anthropologist Georges Condominas’s concept, but developed by James Clifford. See Clifford (1997, esp. 22–23).

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Mary A. Knighton 6 I am grateful to University of Guam Professor of History and Chamorro Studies, Anne Perez Hattori, for discussions by email about energized activism and political organizing on Guam to resist the military buildup. “We Are Guåhan” emerged, during the build-up hearings, as the most formidable, organized, vocal resistance group. At Michael Bevacqua’s “Famoksaiyan” blog, one finds “Hita Guåhan,” the UN Testimonies by Chamorros in more recent years. Most of the pieces were written by younger activists, including Perez (See http://famoksaiyan.blogspot.com/). Bevacqua also forges links to Okinawan activists.

Bibliography Clifford, James. “Traveling Cultures.” Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. 17–46. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 315–423. Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Hsu, Hsuan. “Guåhan (Guam), Literary Emergence, and the American Pacific in Homebase and from unincorporated territory.” American Literary History 24. 2 (Summer 2012): 281–307. Johnson, Chalmers. Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2000. Kaplan, Amy. “Literature and Imperialism.” A New Literary History of the United States. Eds. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009. 444. Kaplan, Amy, “Where is Guantanamo?” American Quarterly 57 (September 2005): 831–858. Lai, Paul. “Discontiguous States of America: The Paradox of Unincorporation in Craig Santos Perez’s Poetics of Chamorro Guam.” Journal of Transnational American Studies 3. 2 (2011): 1–28. Lim, Louisa. “Tiny Island to Take 17 Guantanamo Detainees.” National Public Radio. June 10, 2009. https://www.npr.org. Lye, Colleen. America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. 10. Marcus, Greil and Werner Sollors, eds. A New Literary History of the United States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1964. New York: Routledge, 2010. Perez, Craig Santos. from unincorporated territory: [hacha]. Hawai’i: Tinfish Press, 2008. Perez, Craig Santos. from unincorporated territory: [saina]. Richmond, CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2010. Perez, Craig Santos. from unincorporated territory: [guma’]. Richmond, CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2014. Perez, Craig Santos.“Transterritorial Currents and the Imperial Terripelago.” American Quarterly 67. 3 (September 2015): 619–624. Perez, Craig Santos. from unincorporated territory: [lukao]. Richmond, CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2017. Perez, Craig Santos. “Guam and Archipelagic American Studies.”Archipelagic American Studies. Eds. Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. 97–112. Perez, Craig Santos and Brandy Na-lani McDougall, eds. Home(is)lands: New Art and Writing from Guåhan & Hawai’i. Honolulu, HI: ALA Press, 2017. Roberts, Brian Russell. “Archipelagic American Literary History and the Philippines.” American Literary History 27. 1 (Spring 2015): 128–140. Roberts, Brian Russell and Michelle Ann Stephens, eds. Archipelagic American Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Rogers, Robert F. Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam. Honolulu: University of Hawai’I Press, 2011[1995]. Rowe, John Carlos. “‘Shades of Paradise’: Craig Santos Perez’s Transpacific Voyages.” Archipelagic American Studies. Eds. Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. 213–231. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen, 1987. Twain, Mark. To the Person Sitting in Darkness. New York: Anti-Imperialist League of New York, 1901. Clemens, Samuel, University of Virginia American Studies online site: http://xroads.virginia.edu/ ~drbr/sitting.html (accessed 16 January 2019).

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30 POST-APOCALYPTIC GEOGRAPHIES AND STRUCTURAL APPROPRIATION Hsuan L. Hsu and Bryan Yazell

Introduction Post-apocalyptic fiction, with its dramatic re-imaginings of environment, space, and geopolitics, presents distinctive problems for the field of Transnational American Studies. The massive influence of post-apocalyptic narratives on US culture makes this genre a key site for orchestrating public thinking about the geographies of environmental catastrophe. Historically, US-led patterns of production, consumption, and militarization have been a driving force behind twentieth- and twenty-first century environmental crises. The most devastating consequences of these environmental changes have generally occurred beyond US boundaries, affecting vulnerable populations in the global South (as well as poor, racialized, and Indigenous US communities). Yet despite the transnational dynamics of environmental devastation, post-apocalyptic narratives frequently center the future suffering and struggles of US spaces and characters without sufficiently attending to how apocalyptic environmental violence has already affected a range of colonized and post-colonial populations. Drawing on postcolonial theory, Indigenous studies, and ecocriticism, this chapter will argue that the centering of US Americans in post-apocalyptic fiction constitutes what we term structural appropriation—a process in which the world-threatening structural violence that has already been experienced by colonized and postcolonial populations is projected onto American (and predominantly white) characters and readers. Whereas cultural appropriation has been the subject of considerable research in Indigenous studies and critical race studies, the more insidious technique of “structural appropriation”—which obscures histories of colonialism and racism even while restaging them in dystopian plots—has received much less critical attention. To better understand the colonial and postcolonial experiences of environmental apocalypse that are occluded by structural appropriation, we compare the temporal and spatial dimensions of a range of US, postcolonial, and Indigenous post-apocalyptic narratives.

Structural appropriation Whereas cultural appropriation detaches narratives and practices from both their original producers and their social and material contexts (see Ziff and Rao 1997), structural appropriation detaches structural violence from its historical entanglements with colonialism and 347

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racism. Unlike cultural appropriation—which is generally overt in claiming and recirculating the cultural productions of other groups—structural appropriation tends to be covert, projecting conditions of structural vulnerability that have been experienced by colonized and post-colonial populations on to imaginary and predominantly white Americans inhabiting dystopian futures. Simultaneously drawing on and occluding an already existing transnational archive of environmental catastrophes, post-apocalyptic narratives evoke a sense of proleptic mourning for the disappearance of privileged, unsustainable modes of consumption pioneered by the US. Structural appropriation is especially relevant to the framing of environmental apocalypses in dystopian fiction. The planetary scale of much environmental discourse, and particularly discourses concerning global climate change, frequently focuses on preventing future disasters while passing over climate disasters that have already transpired, such as the displacement of Inuit and Solomon Islanders by shoreline erosion and the role of drought in Syria’s Civil War. The notion of the “boomerang effect”—Ulrich Beck’s term (Beck 1992, 37–38) for how environmental risks supposedly (eventually) return to harm their originators as well as their recipients—transforms an Indigenous hunting implement (one that was never intended to harm the thrower) into a metaphor for the putative universality of environmental devastation. But the actual effects of environmental externalities that are disproportionately produced by the US are unevenly distributed, because underdevelopment, dispossession, poor infrastructure, and other structural inequities resulting from colonialism leave colonized and postcolonial nations vulnerable to both emerging environmental risks and the long aftermath of previous waves of environmental devastation. Gordon Fraser has argued that apocalyptic thinking was central to US military logic during the Cold War: “the contingency of annihilation—the uncertain possibility of a holocaust— structures how United States Americans have been conditioned to think about nuclear war and war more broadly” (Fraser 2015, 602). Fraser leverages this “coupling of power with potential annihilation” to explain both the popularity of post-apocalyptic narratives such as On the Beach (1957), Dr. Strangelove (1964), and The Road (2006) and the critique of this military apocalypticism articulated by Native American authors such as Sherman Alexie. Whereas conventional post-apocalyptic scenarios focus on a small group of survivors endeavoring to regenerate US culture and society, Alexie’s Indigenous discourses of apocalypse underscore the environmental “slow violence” (Nixon 2011, 2) wrought by both nuclear and conventional warfare. Fraser thus argues that “Alexie addresses the apocalypticism of United States power…by critiquing its presence on the Spokane Reservation and connecting this presence to sites of United States military power around the world” (Fraser 2015, 608). Fraser attributes Alexie’s critical perspective on apocalypticism to the fact that the apocalypse, for Native Americans, is not a future scenario but a historical experience. This framing of Indigenous history was first developed in the writings of Indigenous studies scholars Sidner Larson (Gros Ventre) (2000) and Lawrence Gross (Anishinaabe) (2002). For Larson, “postapocalypse theory” suggested that “[t]he ways in which American Indian people have suffered, survived, and managed to go on, communicated through storytelling, have tremendous potential to affect the future of all mankind” (Larson 2000, 18). Gross coins the phrase “Post Apocalypse Stress Syndrome” to capture the psychological and institutional devastation wrought by the end of Native American worlds: “American Indians in general have seen the end of our worlds. There are no Indian cultures in the United States that remain wholly unaffected by the presence of Euro-Americans…. In effect, the old world of our ancestors has come to an end. Thus, American Indians are living in a postapocalyptic environment…” (Gross 2002, 449). More recently, Indigenous scholars including Grace Dillon (Anishinaabe) 348

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(2012), Cutcha Risling Baldy (Hupa et al. 2014), Zoe Todd (Métis) (2016), and Kyle Powys Whyte (Potawatomi) (2017) have drawn on this postapocalypse model to frame the settler colonial referents of the zombie apocalypse, connections between Indigenous genocide and the Anthropocene, and “indigenous perspectives on how to respond to anthropogenic climate destabilization based on having already lived through local losses of species and ecosystems” (Whyte 2017, 8). Our theorization of structural appropriation is inspired by Dillon’s incisive observation about “the dominant themes that mainstream sf has drawn from the real history of Eurowestern and Indigenous encounters” (Dillon 2012, 9). While there are important differences between settler colonial and postcolonial conditions, postcolonial scholars have diagnosed similar processes of cultural and ecological annihilation throughout the Global South. Partha Chatterjee has detailed how globalization intensifies the centralization of power “in the metropolitan cities of the industrialized world” while further entrenching the geopolitical gap between center and periphery (Chatterjee 2004, 90). Rob Nixon has documented the proliferation of attritional “slow violence” across a range of postcolonial sites as “ecosystem people” are displaced from both temporal and spatial landscapes (Nixon 2011, 62). Describing environmental “slow violence” as “a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space,” Nixon shows how transnational projects such as oil extraction, deforestation, pesticide production, imperial wars, megadams, and the establishment of eco-parks derange place-based ecologies and temporalities that are essential to the survival of people who live off the land (Nixon 2011, 2). Neoliberal projects across the Global South thus gradually erode the basic ecological conditions of social reproduction for vulnerable postcolonial populations, effectively bringing about the end of established worlds. In his novel dramatizing the long aftermath of the Bhopal catastrophe (to which we will return below), Indra Sinha reflects this process by framing the population of a city affected by a catastrophic chemical spill as “the People of the Apokalis” (Sinha 2007, 366). If, as Lawrence Buell has noted, “[a]pocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the environmental imagination has at its disposal,” we should keep in mind that narratives of apocalypse can conceal and obscure as much as they reveal (Buell 1995, 285). Post-apocalyptic narratives have been widely critiqued for their potentially paralyzing fatalism, as well as for staging a state of emergency intended to legitimize military aggression and other aggressive interventions. The concept of structural appropriation further illuminates how these speculative narratives occlude the colonial and racial underpinnings of structural violence by delinking it from actually existing geographic and historical referents. Rather than exploring environmental apocalypses that have already happened to populations outside the US (or to sovereign Indigenous nations putatively located “within” the US), post-apocalyptic fiction re-inscribes colonial and racial logics in imagined futures that, in many cases, have been unmoored from histories of race and empire. In the readings that follow, we will consider some of the racial and colonial implications of post-apocalyptic fiction exemplified by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015), then explore how the postcolonial and Indigenous authors Indra Sinha and Benjamin Ross Hayden critically re-imagine apocalyptic geographies and temporalities in Animal’s People (2007) and The Northlander (2016).

The third-worlding of the West Post-apocalyptic fiction provides a crucial basis for viewing not only the economic but also the environmental manifestations of global inequality. Structural appropriation has been both a crucial component as well as an underlying point of tension for texts that consider the global consequences of environmental collapse. McCarthy (2010) and Bacigalupi’s (2015) 349

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post-apocalyptic novels provide readers with the means for visualizing the material manifestations of global climate change to the extent they depict what Nixon calls the “delayed effects” of ecological catastrophe after “both the causes and the memory” of cataclysmic events “fade from view” (Nixon 2011, 9). These texts situate environmental catastrophe as a primary catalyst for US decline, whose geopolitical conflicts and internal violence eventually pushes population to a state of extreme poverty. In these novels, US subjects have been transformed into desperate refugees, at once vulnerable and dangerous. As this last point suggests, critiques of neoliberalism and governmental policy in these sources operate in part by inviting a sustained comparison between the US and the Global South. The most apparent implication in these cases is that the US is not immune to the worst effects of climate change in particular and social-economic disasters more generally. Further, they argue that we need only look to the structural instability of foreign states to see how this crisis might play out at home. But this conceit also limits any figuration of crisis on a truly planetary scale. Instead, it situates the Global South as a template for disaster; a prototype for (what the novels imply) is the more critical moment when the US loses its hegemonic standing in the world. Such cases highlight what structural appropriation as a narrative technique can and cannot do to acknowledge transnational manifestations of the apocalypse. Bacigalupi’s novel embodies the tension inherent in how US speculative fiction often figures the global dimensions to catastrophe. The Water Knife depicts the violence that has engulfed Southwestern cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix as a result of a permanent drought on one hand and decades of counterproductive infrastructure planning on the other. The novel’s “water knife”, an agent for an unscrupulous water baron, exploits this frayed institutional fabric in order to redirect water rights from precarious communities to his employer. Bacigalupi stresses how factors including class and geography have led to the unequal distribution of the worst effects of this water crisis. For instance, the novel depicts Texas as a failed state, with Arizona teetering on the brink of complete social collapse. Geographic inequality extends beyond the US as well. Readers learn early in the narrative that “China knew how to see the world clearly and planned ahead. And because of it, China was resilient in comparison to the brokeback version of America” (Bacigalupi 2015, 25). Throughout the novel, Americans see themselves in a subservient role, both individually and geopolitically, to Chinese subjects and business interests. This general framing of the US and China speaks to The Water Knife’s most evident figuration of third-worlding the West as a result of apocalyptic social collapse. Bacigalupi’s sustained US-China comparison is one example of how his novel refers to foreign states as a way of visualizing the unequal damage brought by climate change. If Bacigalupi’s critical observations about contemporary neoliberal and governmental practices shape his narrative, his vision of future Chinese neo-imperialism also draws from a long tradition of “technoOrientalism” within the American speculative genre. But whereas speculative writers have deployed Asian cultural signifiers as an expression of techno-futurism, Bacigalupi signals a larger shift in the structural position of Americans vis-à-vis the global community.1 In other words, the novel is concerned less with an ascendant China than it is with the US backsliding down the geopolitical ladder. The central component of this argument involves readers imagining the US as subject to—rather than a purveyor of—neo-imperial power. A counterpoint to the Chinese model, Mexico and the borderland plays a central part in making this point. Angel, the water knife agent, considers the “raining bodies” that precipitate Arizona’s imminent collapse: “It reminded him of how it had been down in Mexico, before the Cartel States took control completely” (Bacigalupi 2015, 245). In this instance both present and (in the novel’s framing) future structural violence in Mexico sets the stage for imagining what such violence might look like wholly within US borders. In the novel’s codification of 350

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national and cultural archetypes, China represents the future of state models while Mexico represents prior, failed ones. Such representations of social instability appropriate and reencode typologies associated with foreign populations that have already been touched by structural violence. Whereas Bacigalupi’s surface narrative foregrounds the various governmental and private actors that contribute to inequality, McCarthy’s novel largely avoids any such gestures. Instead, McCarthy emphasizes the shared—and presumably universal—implications of the apocalypse by framing his narrative in allegorical terms. As a result, The Road novel lacks The Water Knife’s voluminous references to political and economic actors, depicting instead an anonymous father’s struggle to keep his son alive several years after an unexplained apocalyptic event. In particular, it foregrounds the environmental destruction that has wiped out all wildlife as well as agricultural production, which in turn has prompted the rise of large roving bands of cannibals. The simplified presentation in this case of the man, his child, and paternal responsibility reflects the atavistic social bonds—deriving from biological, familial and ethical obligations—that drive the narrative. The man later makes this last point expressly clear when he explains later in the narrative that he protects his son because he “was appointed to do that by God” (McCarthy 2010, 80). As this proverbial language should suggest, The Road figures its apocalypse in universalizing (and Biblical) terms, both in its geographical scope and its effect on humanity.2 But even as the narrative eschews specific references to time and place, it still draws on global and historical precedents for structural instability. These play out most immediately in McCarthy’s staging of the dehumanizing violence that characterizes the post-apocalypse. In the narrative, the vestiges of civilization have devolved into a basic struggle for survival: the most pressing threat involves roaming cannibals that attack anyone they encounter. As a result, the father and son are thoroughly vulnerable subjects. At the same time, the cannibals’ omnipresence and savagery stand in contrast with the father’s singular commitment to protecting his son. Early in the novel, the father kills a cannibal in front of his child, who is left “covered with gore and mute as a stone” (McCarthy 2010, 69). In this instance, the cannibal’s potential to commit violence calls for intervention at all costs. The novel adds to this characterization later, when the protagonists come across an old plantation house that has become a cannibal stronghold. Here in the novel’s most gruesome scene, the man encounters a basement filled with still-living victims held captive (McCarthy 2010, 116). The staging of this scene encourages the reader to compare the dramatic discovery with the evocative history of the plantation house, where “[c]hattel slaves had once trod” (McCarthy 2010, 112). The episode lays bare the contradiction at the heart of how McCarthy’s novel figures vulnerability. At first glance, the allusion to slavery places the apocalyptic scene on a larger timeline, one that compares acts of inhumanity—chattel slavery, genocide, and mass murder—that specifically reverberate throughout US history. At the same time, this comparison only works inasmuch that it creates a negative model for humanity that contrasts with the father and his son. According to the narrative’s reasoning, the cannibals are inhuman and, as a result, killable subjects; they are also in a position of power that makes all other people in The Road extremely vulnerable. The cannibal embodies the novel’s overarching claim about the human condition, which fixates on symbols of evil for the purposes of delimiting what humanity involves in the first place. In another scene, the man recalls a childhood memory involving “rough men” unearthing a “great bolus of serpents” that had collected in a grotto “for a common warmth”: “The men poured gasoline on them and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be” (McCarthy 2010, 200). While the casual cruelty of the memory hints at the violence underlying 351

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civilization in general, it also clarifies the role of the cannibal—as an omnipresent and highly mobile threat—in putting into relief the man’s own ethical integrity. By making cannibals both victims and beneficiaries of vulnerability, The Road asserts the father’s singular embodiment of humanity. The vexed depiction of cannibalism—and especially its parallel with chattel slavery—extends from the problem inherent to the novel’s universalism. Ultimately, the novel glosses the structural violence associated with plantation slavery not to explore the implied continuity between past and future apocalypses, but to amplify the humanizing relation between father and son. Critics have pointed out that McCarthy’s focus on this specific relationship is central to his overall framing of environmental catastrophe, insofar as he “correlates parental care with human survival when the nonhuman environment has virtually ceased to exist” (Johns-Putra 2016, 531). The man’s struggle to protect his child should, the novel argues, register something of affective and humanistic bonds between humanity and the environment more generally. Thus he frequently reminds his son that they are the “good guys” who “don’t give up” (McCarthy 2010, 145). However, the contrast between these characters on one side and nearly every other human on the other further distinguishes and valorizes the man’s specific features. The universalizing framing to the novel consequently runs up against the explicit (and conservative) encoding of the father’s masculinity, individualism, and his commitment to faith and family. If the apocalyptic scenarios of The Road and The Water Knife intend to rouse readers to action, then structural appropriation plays a key role in making the apocalypse both plausible and visible. The limitations of this approach are apparent elsewhere in American speculative literature. For instance, Octavia Butler’s Earthseed novels likewise build on real-world precedents of structural vulnerability, from historical cases like “Nazi Germany” to the observable phenomenon of “throw-away labor” in the Mexico-US borderland (Butler and Francis 2010, 198, 44–5). In view of these examples, Butler’s fiction highlights what she claimed are the “various things that… are going to lead us to living in a world that we really don’t want to live in” (Butler and Francis 2010, 198). The reference to “throw-away labor” underscores how neoliberalism’s present fundamentally shapes imaginings of future social dysfunction in the Global North. But even as such writings acknowledge this legacy, they still frame the apocalypse as a “world” that can only emerge (or remerge) in the US. Lived experiences of structural violence—and the US’s current role in perpetuating the most devastating components to regimes of global neoliberalism and colonialism—remain relegated to the background of these texts. The following section turns to Indigenous and postcolonial narratives of apocalypse that engage more directly with historically grounded forms of structural violence, as well as the insights of populations that have already lived through apocalyptic transformations.

Post-apocalyptic geographies Structural appropriation cuts both ways: If it references and extrapolates from already existing catastrophes in the Global South, it also occludes specific histories of racial and colonial violence in imagining future catastrophes affecting American settler populations. Structural appropriation frequently foregrounds the theme of environmental blowback (Beck’s “boomerang effect”) suffered by formerly privileged groups, while obscuring strategies of survival created by Indigenous and postcolonial populations who have already experienced apocalypse. As proponents of the “post-apocalypse theory” of Indigenous culture emphasize, the end of their worlds did not make these populations vanish so much as it pushed them to invent new methods of ecological and cultural reproduction. Animal’s People and The Northlander exemplify how postcolonial and Indigenous artists frame the geographies of apocalypse 352

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in ways that highlight the complex interconnections between colonialism, structural violence, and post-apocalyptic modes of life and futurity. Animal’s People focalizes environmental catastrophe through the perspective of Animal, an orphan whose spine has been warped by the effects of a toxic chemical leak in Khaufpur. The novel’s setting invokes the environmental illnesses, lack of health care, and interminable lawsuits that characterized the long aftermath of 1984 chemical disaster in Bhopal, India. Animal, who refuses to identify as “human,” joins a group of activists organized by Zafar that struggles to hold the American “Kampani” accountable for reparations and cleanup in the wake of the disaster. Echoing the opinion of the Catholic nun who raised him, Animal repeatedly refers to Khaufpur as the site of the “Apokalis” (Sinha 2007, 63). Whereas McCarthy and the book of Revelation frame Apocalypse in universalizing terms, Sinha’s vernacular rendering underscores the local and contingent nature of apocalypse. Thus, Elli Barber—a humanitarian doctor who serves as the novel’s stand-in for Western readers—fundamentally fails to understand the apocalyptic temporality she witnesses in Khaufpur. Animal tells her that “[i]n the Kingdom of the poor, time doesn’t exist…. Hope dies in places like this, because hope lives in the future and there’s no future here, how can you think about tomorrow when all your strength is used up trying to get through today?” (Sinha 2007, 185) Khaufpur’s “Apokalis” is characterized by both spatial and temporal differentiation: in Sinha’s unexceptional, everyday scenario of disaster, it is “always now o’clock” (Sinha 2007, 185). Nixon elaborates on the temporal complexities of environmental “slow violence” dramatized by the novel. He explains that “Animal’s People exposes the uneven timelines and multiple speeds of environmental terror,” which encompasses “the initial toxic event that kills thousands instantly; the fatal fire that erupts years later, when the deserted but still-polluted factory reignites; the contaminants that continue to leach into the communal bloodstream; and the monsoon season that each year washes abandoned chemicals into the aquifers, repoisoning wells and producing new cycles of deferred casualties” (Nixon 2011, 61). These timelines of chemical toxicity interact with previously established dynamics of colonial occupation, postcolonial dispossession, and infrastructural violence: there is considerable overlap between the populations that Animal describes as the “Kingdom of the Poor” and the “People of the Apokalis” (Sinha 2007, 177, 366). Sinha stages unexpected affiliations and conceptions of futurity forged amid debilitating waves of attritional violence. Hindus and Muslims, Khaufpuris and outsiders, the (temporarily) able-bodied and the debilitated collectively work through Khaufpur’s ongoing trauma in the novel’s extensive description of the local fire-walking ritual in observation of Ashara Mubarak, as well as in more political actions including a hunger strike and an illegal occupation of the contaminated (and prohibited) factory site. This apocalyptic solidarity, grounded in shared exposures to environmental violence, extends far beyond Khaufpur: “Is Khaufpur the only poisoned city? It is not. There are others and each one of [them] has its own Zafar. There’ll be a Zafar in Mexico City and others in Hanoi and Manila and Halabja and there are the Zafars of Minamata and Sevoso, of São Paulo and Toulouse…” (Sinha 2007, 296). Sinha’s decision to set his novelization of the Bhopal catastrophe in the fictional city of “Khaufpur” (a name that literally translates as “city of fear”) establishes a different kind of allegory than McCarthy’s: Khaufpur could reference any of a multitude of cities worldwide whose populations have been exposed to environmental violence, often through the machinations of global capitalism and/ or US militarization. The “Apokalis” thus names a process of uneven development calculated to gradually devastate vulnerable environments and populations. The novel’s final lines leverage this sense of global capitalism’s unevenly distributed apocalypses to envision a post-human future dominated by debilitated, chemically or radioactively transformed populations: “All 353

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things pass, but the poor remain. We are the People of the Apokalis. Tomorrow there will be more of us” (Sinha 2007, 366). Rather than employing apocalyptic discourse to warn readers away from a degraded condition characterized by pollution, disability, and death, Animal welcomes the expansion of his already apocalyptic world. For, as Animal’s story has demonstrated, only the people of the Apokalis—rather than those whose way of living depends upon the quiet devastation of local worlds elsewhere—are in a position to imagine how to survive the end of the world. As Grace Dillon has written, speculative “Native Apocalypse” narratives are similarly concerned with alternative conceptions of survival and futurity. “Native apocalyptic storytelling,” she writes, “shows the ruptures, the scars, and the trauma in its effort ultimately to provide healing and a return to bimaadiziwin [the state of balance]. This is the path to a sovereignty embedded in self-determination” (Dillon 2012, 9). The Northlander, a post-apocalyptic film by the Métis filmmaker Benjamin Ross Hayden featuring an allFirst Nations cast, inverts the conventional marginalization of racialized populations in post-apocalyptic narratives in order to center the question of Indigenous futurity. Whereas many post-apocalyptic stories focus on the relationship between the present and its dystopian future, The Northlander underscores the past in order to drive home the point that the apocalypse is nothing new for Indigenous nations like the Métis. According to Hayden, “The film is inspired by…the 1885 Battle of Batoche…where [the Métis leader] Louis Riel challenged the colonial ways of life…. The same struggle is reflected in the film” (quoted in Kinnari 2016). Instead of focusing on the battle itself, the film focuses on its protagonist’s personal quest for metaphysical “answers” that will enable his people—the community of Last Arc—to survive. The historical connection is further evident in the filming locale, which “took place in the Alberta Badlands near Montana, where Riel took refuge before returning to lead the Métis rebellion” (Kinnari 2016). The Northlander’s subtle references to Riel are encoded in both oblique historical parallels and the specificities of landscape. The theory of Native Apocalypse offers ample context for Hayden’s unusual decision to set a work of historical fiction in a post-apocalyptic future: the problems of identity, survival, and survivance3 posed by the end of the world are not new for Indigenous nations. As Larson notes, “temporal unification of the past and future with the present”—or a form of narrative that attends to present and historical apocalypses as well as future threats—is among the most distinctive contributions of Native American stories (Larson 2000, 38). Hayden reimagines the historical Riel as Cygnus, a solitary hunter and fighter who was taken in by the community of Last Arc. When the settlement is attacked by roving “Heretics,” its matriarchal leader asks Cygnus (in the film’s characteristically oblique dialogue) to explore uncharted terrain in quest of knowledge left behind by “humans”—“to go somewhere dark, where there is light that has an answer.” During his quest, Cygnus is captured by a vicious group of Heretics who are also in search of what is effectively a time capsule containing “Everything their world had, and their children do not.” After Cygnus escapes with a fellow captive named Mari, they find the dark place and enter separate rooms with technological interfaces. Here, the “light that has an answer” turns out to be surprisingly like film: moving images and recorded sounds that instruct Cygnus about the vital role of “love.” These short recordings overwhelm Mari with grief, but Cygnus discovers in them the “answer” he was sent for: “Anywhere in the world will be your home; it’s just a long walk you’re going on.” When Cygnus sees an illuminated globe, he realizes there is no place beyond the desolate world they inhabit: “There’s nothing more. All we can do is move across this place. All we can do is move, and survive.” Although this “answer” appears as bleak as the scenario of McCarthy’s 354

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The Road, the imperative to “move, and survive” reads differently given the Métis’s history as a migratory society that followed the buffalo they hunted. Cygnus and Mari make love in the dark place, and eventually return to Last Arc with new perspectives on love, time, and movement. “I see time differently now,” says Cygnus. Despite the impossibility of escaping the apocalypse, Cygnus affirms that “we are not out of time. To feel is to live. To feel is to continue.” If the dark place with the “light that has an answer” functions as an analogue of film—a medium that has played a powerful role (particularly in the genre of the Hollywood Western) in consolidating settler national identities while marginalizing and denigrating Indigenous nations—it presents apocalyptic scenarios distinct from the domestic, national, and racial ideologies that characterize settler film traditions. The dying “human” (i.e., settler) voice saying to her child “Anywhere in the world will be your home” affirms the long-denigrated nomadic practices of many Indigenous nations as the (post-) human condition in the wake of the apocalypse. The knowledge that is transmitted by cinema here is not settler ideology but the vital importance of traditional Métis mobility. As the historian Michael Hogue writes: The mobility of such Indigenous peoples as the Plains Metis was…an obvious reminder of the preexisting territorialities and sovereignties that new national borders such as the forty-ninth parallel sought to overwrite. The ongoing movement of the Metis laid bare one of the central fictions of new national geographies: that Indigenous peoples were internal subjects who had accepted their place within the nation, rather than sovereign peoples. (Hogue 2015, 6) Hayden’s film is less concerned with questions of physical survival than with psychological and cultural survival in the face of “Post-Apocalypse Stress Syndrome.” The “Heretics” who threaten Cygnus’s community are an inverted reference to those who accused Riel of heresy for believing himself to be a divinely chosen prophet and leader of his people. The film’s Heretics have no apparent sense of empathy, community, or common purpose. By contrast, Mari and Cygnus learn the importance of both feelings and the Métis people’s traditional migratory mode of life. For a nation oriented around migration and hunting, “All we can do is move, and survive” is an affirmation: not a struggle for biological survival but a realization that movement is essential to the survival and resurgence of Métis culture. As this chapter has shown, American post-apocalyptic fiction exemplifies both the possibilities and common problems with structural appropriation: the way it is used to simultaneously reference problems of geographically uneven environmental violence and obscure their historical conditions. Structural appropriation pushes actual racialized and colonized populations into the margins even in the course of rehearsing the environmental violence those populations have suffered. And more often than not, the purpose of structural appropriation is to present cautionary tales about the future thirdworlding of the West with the aim of motivating Western readers to avert conditions that are already being lived in the Global South. By contrast, postcolonial and Indigenous narratives frame the apocalypse as a condition to inhabit and learn from—a condition that profoundly transforms humanity itself. For authors like Sinha and Hayden, the apocalypse is not a threatened end but an event that has already occurred, that continues in the present and pushes us to reimagine narratives of postcolonial and Indigenous survival and futurity. 355

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Notes 1 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun describes how high-tech Orientalism “seeks to orient the reader to a technology-overloaded present/ future (which is portrayed as belonging to Japan or other Far East Countries) through the promise of readable difference, and through the conflation of information networks with an exotic urban landscape” (Chun 2006, 77). See also the comprehensive overview of this tradition in Roh, Huang, and Niu’s Techno-Orientalism. 2 Indeed, various critics have read the narrative as a redemptive parable with Edenic, messianic or Arthurian parallels (see, for example, Josephs 2013). 3 For Vizenor, “Native survivance is an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion; survivance is the continuance of stories, not a mere reaction” in the face of attempted genocide (Vizenor 2008, 1).

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31 THINKING AFTER THE HEMISPHERIC The planetary expanse of transnational American writing Takayuki Tatsumi

Introduction In a passage from a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, read in Congress on June 28, 1776, Thomas Jefferson accused George III of having waged “cruel War against human Nature itself, violating its most Sacred Rights of Life and Liberty in the Persons of a distant People who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into Slavery in another Hemisphere, or to incur miserable Death in their Transportation thither.”1 Although this passage was to be deleted from the definitive text formally adopted by Congress on July 4, 1776, what did Jefferson mean by “another hemisphere”? A traditional interpretation very naturally defines it as the Western Hemisphere to which colonial America forcibly transported native Africans of the Eastern Hemisphere into slavery. Whatever Jefferson hoped to imply by vaguely invoking “another hemisphere,” and however magically these words disappeared from the final text of the Declaration of Independence, we must recognize how the concept of the “hemispheric” has been present from the founding of the country through to our contemporary moment. Today’s political viewpoint undoubtedly invites us to reread this term as signifying not only the Western Hemisphere but also the Northern Hemisphere. Taking into account the nineteenth-century rise of the Monroe Doctrine, whose post-Jeffersonian hemispheric imagination led to the twenty-first-century imperative of the Bush Doctrine in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, I feel obliged now to reconsider the paradoxical way post-Revolutionary America came to champion the cause of post-colonialism as the discourse of cryptoimperialism—and to recognize how in the Trump administration, such imperialism has reached its newest zenith; while he has attempted to reinforce the border wall between the United States and Mexico, Trump also has a transpacific agenda, looking to impact Far East geopolitics, most notably in the US-North Korea Summit of 2018. It is in this respect that whenever and wherever war breaks out, we often find ourselves thinking of total apocalypse and planetary survival simultaneously. For those of us involved in Transnational American 357

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Studies, our work is interdisciplinary and deeply connected to the larger, shared concerns of those engaged in discovering and analysing the transnational impacts experienced in societies and across time. From this perspective, I would like to further explore the theoretical frontier of planetarity by re-examining the recent theories of Gerald Vizenor, Gayatri Spivak, Wai Chee Dimock, Lawrence Buell, Gretchen Murphy and Yunte Huang. In order to achieve this purpose I will illustrate my points with transpacific writers ranging from Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Sakyo Komatsu down to Karen Tei Yamashita.

Metamorphoses of the Monroe Doctrine: From Jefferson through George W. Bush George Washington’s “Farewell Address” (September 19, 1796) first proposed a kind of national policy of isolationism and non-interference: In contemplating the causes which may disturb our Union, it occurs as a matter of serious concern, that any ground should have been furnished for characterizing parties by Geographical discriminations—Northern and Southern—Atlantic and Western; whence designing men may endeavour to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views. … The Great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign Nations is in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible.2 Further renovating the hemispheric imagination suggested by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, Jefferson’s disciple James Monroe and his close friend John Quincy Adams joined forces to create the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, nearly half a century after the Declaration of Independence. On December 2, 1823, the fifth president of the United States James Monroe published his “Annual Message to Congress,” putting special emphasis on the following statement: We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.3 Today, we take it for granted that the Monroe Doctrine guarantees the Western Hemisphere’s right to refuse the Eastern Hemisphere’s political and colonialist intervention, promising neither to intervene in the international affairs of the Eastern Hemisphere nor to colonize other countries in the Western Hemisphere except for the reason of protection. At first glance, the Monroe Doctrine seems to be the archetypal post-colonial critique of George III’s act of carrying native Africans into slavery in the Western Hemisphere, but upon examination it may indicate the prototype of another form of imperialism, thus symptomizing future Anglo-American intervention and domination in the Latin American countries of the Southern Hemisphere. Doubtless, in the rhetoric of the Monroe Doctrine lies the twisted logic naturalizing the ambivalence between post-colonialism and crypto-imperialism. It is this twist of logic that made possible the vindication of Manifest Destiny in antebellum America, leading to Pax Americana in the twentieth century and American unilateralism in the twenty-first century. The rough draft, as well as the final version of the Declaration of Independence contain not only the theory of abolitionism but also the oxymoronic concept of what could well be called “post-colonial imperialism.” Without this twist of logic the 358

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United States may never have constructed its military strategy for the Far East, forcing open Japan in 1853 (the very country Herman Melville in the 1851 novel Moby-Dick called the “double-bolted land,” which both prevented its citizens from leaving it and the foreigners from entering it) and occupying it in the postwar years from 1945 through 1952. Even though the Far East undoubtedly is in the Eastern Hemisphere the Founding Fathers had promised not to intervene in two centuries prior, but which the Spanish-American War allowed the United States to dominate. As a result of what William V. Spanos called “the American exceptionalist ethos” (Spanos 2014, 4), the United States seized from Spain the latter’s colonies of Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Making the most of this twist of logic, or the rhetoric of political ambivalence peculiar to the United States, Gretchen Murphy’s Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire reads the political unconscious of Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, and Nathaniel Hawthorne as not incompatible with the hardcore version of the Monroe Doctrine. There are four metamorphic stages of the Monroe Doctrine that show the way the United States gradually came to justify the double logic and the ambivalent politics of “hemisphere.” The first stage became visible when Theodore Roosevelt clarified his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine by proclaiming in 1904 that not only did America have the right, à la Monroe, to block European attempts to re-colonize any of the Western Hemisphere, it also had the right to take over and shape up any nation in the hemisphere guilty of “chronic wrongdoing” or uncivilized behavior that left it “impotent”; that is, powerless to defend itself against aggressors from the “Other Hemisphere,” meaning England, France, Spain, Germany, or Italy.4 The second stage was prepared by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who became deeply disturbed in 1912 by the Japanese businessmen on the verge of buying vast areas of Mexico’s Baja California, bordering Southern California. Cabot established a second corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that prohibited foreign interests, Other Hemispheroids of any description, from giving any foreign government “practical power of control” over territory in the Western Hemisphere.5 The third stage features George Kennan, the diplomat who developed the containment theory of dealing with the Soviet Union after the Second World War. In 1950, Kennan devised the third corollary to the Monroe Doctrine by asserting that since communism was simply a tool of Soviet national power, the United States had no choice but to eradicate communist activity wherever it turned up in Latin America. The fourth stage represents not only the fourth corollary to the Monroe Doctrine but the dramatic rise of what we call the “Bush Doctrine,” which came into being on the very day of George W. Bush’s second inauguration. The voice of New Journalism Tom Wolfe mocked Bush’s speech scathingly: “By Mr. Bush’s Inauguration Day, the Hemi in Hemisphere had long since vanished, leaving the Monroe Doctrine with—what?—nothing but a single sphere […] which is to say, the entire world.”6 Following in Wolfe’s footsteps and further expanding his theory in the context of the Trump presidency, here it is safe to say that we are witnessing the rise of the Trump Doctrine. While the border between Northern and Southern Hemispheres gets tense and critical, the Western Hemisphere as represented by the United States intervenes in the Eastern Hemisphere, trying to resolve the international tension quite ambitiously.

On the Planet of Mississippi: William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms In order to illustrate my theory of post-hemispheric planetarity, I start with rereading William Faulkner’s controversial novel The Wild Palms, originally entitled “If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem,” published in 1939. The Wild Palms is a kind of modern apocalyptic “double” 359

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novel with the flooding of the Mississippi River as the central motif, featuring the city of New Orleans that serves as the geographical junction, the nexus of the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere as well as the Atlantic and the Pacific. The Wild Palms predicts the rise of disaster narratives in modern and postmodern literature affected by not only flood but also by earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes on the transnational level. In retrospect, All-American writer Mark Twain precedes William Faulkner in his representation of the Mississippi River. Twain notes that while the town of Delta used to be three miles below Vicksburg, a recent cut-off radically changed the position, moving Delta two miles above Vicksburg: “The Mississippi does not alter its locality by cut-offs alone: it is always changing its habitat bodily—is always moving bodily sidewise” (Twain 1982[1883]). In addition, Twain does not forget to mention the “Big Flood” of the Mississippi River in 1882, the first major one since 1874, as reported by himself in an article “Voyage of the Times-Democrat’s Relief Boat Through the Inundated Regions”: On the right-hand side of the river is Turnbull’s Island, and on it is a large plantation which formerly was pronounced one of the most fertile in the State. The water has hitherto allowed it to go scot-free in usual floods, but now broad sheets of water told only where fields were. The top of the protecting levee could be seen here and there, but nearly all of it was submerged. (Twain 1982[1883], Appendix A) Being an admirer of Mark Twain, William Faulkner must have been keenly conscious of Life on the Mississippi, whose influence is visible in his representation of nature in The Wild Palms. This double novel consists of two alternating and essentially separate narratives. One is “Wild Palms,” set in 1937, an adulterous romance between a hospital intern Harry Wilbourne and a young married woman who meet in New Orleans and determine to sacrifice everything for love and freedom. The other is “The Old Man,” a disaster novel about a tall, lean, unnamed convict about twenty-five years old surviving the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The former narrative ends up with the death of the heroine as the result of Harry’s failed abortion, whereas the protagonist of the latter rescues a female flood refugee and helps deliver her baby. The intern keeps writing romance fiction for a pulp magazine, while the convict is so innocently swallowed up in pulp detective fiction that he botches a train robbery. Harry has to accept the fate of death, while the tall convict still embraces the hope of life. Although both heroes are destined to inhabit the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, they do not meet at any point in the narratives. Climatography explicates the Great Mississippi Flood as follows: flooding of the lower Mississippi River valley in April 1927, one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States. More than 23,000 square miles (60,000 square km) of land was submerged, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and around 250 people died. After several months of heavy rain caused the Mississippi River to swell to unprecedented levels, the first levee broke on April 16, along the Illinois shore. Then, on April 21, the levee at Mounds Landing in Mississippi gave way.7 Up until that point this was the greatest natural disaster in American history. Faulkner finds an analogy between Noah’s Flood and surviving the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. See for example the way the convict considers “that quarter-acre mound” as “that earthen Ark out 360

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of Genesis” (Faulkner 1990[1939], 652). Faulkner thus weaves a comical story of the tall convict, which serves as a counterpoint to the tragic story of Harry the hospital intern. What matters most here is that the penultimate chapter of “The Old Man” gradually comes to blur the distinction between the tall convict and the Old Man, that is, the Mississippi River: When he saw the River again he knew it at once. He should have; it was now ineradicably a part of his past, his life; it would be a part of what he would bequeath, if that were in store for him. But four weeks later it would look different from what it did now, and did: he (the old man) had recovered from his debauch, back in banks again, rippling placidly toward the sea, brown and rich as chocolate between levees whose inner faces were wrinkled as though in a frozen and aghast amazement, crowned with the rich green of summer in the willows. (Faulkner 1990[1939], 682–683) This passage tactfully superimposes the personal history of the tall convict with the national history of the Mississippi River at large, that is, the old man “brown and rich as chocolate between levees,” who “himself” resembles an old black slave runaway from the plantation. Furthermore, we should not ignore that the national history of the American South the author would like to depict conceals within itself a history of race closely intertwined with that of sexuality. This novel starts with Charlotte’s hatred of “the whole human race,” especially “the race of man” (Faulkner 1990[1939], 500), and ends with the tall convict’s grudge against his former girlfriend, who deceived him and married another man. The latter develops into his malice towards the race of women, that is, the very conclusion to the whole novel: “Women, shit” (Faulkner 1990[1939], 726). In displacing the problematics of ethnicity with that of sexuality, The Wild Palms not only dramatizes the confrontations between the race of men and that of women, but also speculates more deeply on the ethnic fate of “humanity” Faulkner envisions within the “Old Man” himself. At this point, Faulkner undoubtedly conceives in the portrait of the “Old Man” the long and multicultural history of humanity beyond the small and repressive framework of modern man. Whenever a certain kind of fatal panic takes place on the planet, it puts the concept of the modern individual at stake, reviving the deep time of “humanity” per se. Now let me seize the opportunity to reconsider the significance of New Orleans as a key city in The Wild Palms. This city is widely accepted as the entrance into North America as well as the intersection between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Therefore, if we take into account the second stage of the Monroe Doctrine in 1912, which denied any foreign political intervention in the Western Hemisphere, and the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 that made possible transportation between the Atlantic and the Pacific, it is no wonder that the panic of the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 induced Faulkner to write a double novel conscious of deep time as well as the double role of New Orleans as a key junction. According to Kirsten Silva Gruesz, New Orleans occupied a dual historical position from the beginning. It is both a locus of power from which US hegemony over much of Latin America has been extended, and an abjected place within the national body of the US— particularly after Reconstruction and the establishment of neo-colonial relations of dependence on Northern capital. Both positions have been ideologically supported 361

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by the “natural” fact of the city’s access to the Gulf of Mexico, which I will describe as a system of transnational cultural exchange distinct from overlapping regional formulations such as Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” or Joseph Roach’s “circumAtlantic.” (Gruesz 2006, 470) However, it is the construction of the Panama Canal (1904–1914) that revolutionized the hemispheric imagination; it redefined the Gulf of Mexico not only as transatlantic but also transpacific. Thus, Gruesz states. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, New Orleanians represented their city as the central point of Atlantic-to-Pacific trade routes and made vigorous arguments for trans-isthmian passages that would route traffic through the Gulf rather than bypassing it, as the Panama Canal ultimately did. ( Gruesz 2006, 476) However, while the news of Hurricane Katrina drowning New Orleans in the summer of 2005 stormed the whole world, the news of Emily ravaging the Yucatan Peninsula in the same year was not covered globally. This disproportionate media coverage reveals that we are still affected by the bias of traditional continentalism as exemplified even in the 2010s by Trump’s underestimation of Puerto Rico. What is demanded now is a new perspective on New Orleans not as a North American city but as a kind of island linking the Atlantic and the Pacific. Thus, New Orleans gains another significance in this transnational imaginary, as the capital not of a US state but of a broader hemispheric entity that looks North and South in the Americas. Gayatri Spivak coined and defined “planetarity” as “a catachresis for inscribing collective responsibility as right” (Spivak 2003, 102). And yet, lately Yunte Huang has critically redefined it as follows: “Only by means of acknowledgment rather than knowledge, through recognition of both the ontological status of the Other and the epistemological gaps in our knowledge, can we begin to approach the conditions of collective responsibility and planetary imagination” (Huang 2008, 10). To put it another way, planetarity starts by revolutionizing our sense of history and geography and ends up by denaturalizing the discourse of ethnicity and playing the game of collective responsibility at once. In this context, our argument proves to be closely related to Gary Y. Okihiro’s new book Island World (2006), which radically criticizes the continentalist way of thinking, and instead proposes a new vision of insularism focusing on the ocean, and consisting of a number of islands as civilization units. This perspective will enable us to read Faulkner’s The Wild Palms not only as an anecdote in his Deep South Saga, if not Yoknapatowpha Saga, but also as a critical commentary on hardcore American continentalism and as a planetary meditation on the impact of panic on traditional concepts of humanity and orthodox chrono-cartography.

Fabricating ethnicity, displacing hemispheres: Faulkner, Komatsu, Yamashita The planetarity of the Mississippi will carry us into the symbolic year of 1973 that saw not only the Oil Shock but also the coincidental publication of three novels by major Japanese writers who had all perused Faulkner’s The Wild Palms: Catholic novelist Shusaku Endo’s Shikai no Hotori (Beside the Dead Sea), 1994 Nobel Lauriat Kenzaburo Oe’s Kouzui wa Waga Tamashii ni Oyobi (The Flood Invades My Soul), the winner of the Noma Literary Prize that 362

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year, and science fiction writer Sakyo Komatsu’s Nippon Chimbotsu (Japan Sinks) (Komatsu 1977[1973]), the year’s top bestseller with sales of more than four million copies. American readers of Faulkner may wonder why The Wild Palms, one of the minor novels usually excluded from the Faulkner canon, came to influence three major postwar Japanese writers. The reason is very simple. Insofar as Faulkner’s novels are concerned, it is The Wild Palms that was first translated into Japanese. In 1950, one year after Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in literature, translator Yasuo Okubo published the Hibiya Shuppansha edition of The Wild Palms, which was reprinted by Mikasa Shobo in 1951, and which coincided with the translation of Sanctuary (by Naotaro Tatsunokuchi and Masami Nishikawa). What is more, in 1950 a Japanese scholar-critic majoring in French literature Takeo Kuwahara recommended The Wild Palms as one of the best 50 modern literary works in his Bungaku Nyumon (A Reader’s Guide to Literature), published by Iwanami Shoten, one of the most academic publishers in Japan. The year 1954 saw the translation of The Sound and the Fury (translated by Masao Takahashi) and Pylon (translated by Kenzaburo Ohashi), further stimulating the popularity of Faulkner in Japan. The first peak of the Faulknerian fever in Japan was reached in 1955, with Akutagawa Literary Prize winner Yoshie Hotta’s ambitious but premature literary project inspired by The Wild Palms, a project that ended up not so much as a double novel but as a couple of different narratives Jikan (Time) and Yoru no Mori (Nightwood) both published in 1955. 1955 is also the year of Faulkner’s own first and last visit to Japan, which brought about fruitful discussions with Japanese scholars and students at his Nagano Seminar. This experience convinced Faulkner that Japanese people do not necessarily look for new intellectuals, but only human beings, and that they want Japanese writers to reflect Japan’s view that literature conceals an old and meaningful common language, the simplest means of communication shared by all human races. Faulkner wanted to see “humanity” in Japan, the faces of the Japanese. Here we have to note that Faulkner defines one of his key concepts—“humanity”—in the terms of the late Impressionist artists Vincent Van Gogh and Edouard Manet, that is to say, in terms of anthropology. However, it was the year 1973, 18 years after Hotta Yoshie’s literary failure and Faulkner’s visit, that witnessed the first truly Japanese literary recreations of The Wild Palms. First, influenced by Yoshie Hotta, Catholic novelist and perennial candidate for Nobel Prize in Literature Shusaku Endo completed a double novel Upon the Dead Sea, with two alternating narratives: “Pilgrim,” with its twentieth-century viewpoint, and “A Man of the Crowd,” with its first-century viewpoint. Unlike The Wild Palms, Endo’s narratives wind up by drawing closer to each other. Second, although it is not a double novel, Kenzaburo Oe’s The Flood Invades My Soul acutely mirrors the atmosphere of the Japanese students protesting against the renewal of the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty (known as “Ampo”), and creates a contemporary protagonist living in a deserted fallout shelter who will get involved with an eco-terrorist gang “Jiyu-Kokai-dan” (The Free Voyagers). While Faulkner grasped the Mississippi River Flood as the perfect metaphor for the 1930s, the apocalyptic years of the Great Depression, now Oe, who favors a passage from The Wild Palms “between grief and nothing I will take grief” (Faulkner 1990[1939], 715), re-imagines the “Flood” as the perfect metaphor for the nuclear crisis, the most contemporary apocalyptic moment. On one hand, American southern modernist Faulkner attempted to invent his own deep time between the post-Civil War South of the late nineteenth century and the Great Depression of the 1930s. On the other hand, Japanese contemporary writers reinvented Faulkner in their own Far East framework of deep time between the horror of Hiroshima in 1945 and the persistent fear of a full-scale nuclear war after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. 363

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The year 1973 brought not only the impact of the Oil Shock but also the end of the Vietnam War and investigations into the Watergate scandal. The final tragic days of the Nixon presidency in the early 1970s ironically supported the verisimilitude of Komatsu’s disaster novel Nippon Chimbotsu (Japan Sinks), which makes use of recent plate tectonics theory to vividly describe the Pacific coast of the Japanese Archipelago sliding away into the deep, at the same time that the Japan Sea coast rises up for a brief moment, like one side of a capsizing vessel. According to Doctor Tadokoro, who prophesies the submersion of Japan: …in any case, the mantle mass on the Pacific side of the Japan Archipelago is rapidly shrinking. … This may be the harbinger of a crust change of unprecedented kind extending over the whole earth. …Or perhaps it will affect only this area. … If the present speed and direction are maintained, there’s reason enough to believe that once the shift in matter reaches a certain point, the present dynamic balance existing between the mantle and the crust structure will collapse at a stroke. Up to now, you see, the pressure from the Pacific side has held the Archipelago relatively firm against the pressure coming from the continental side. And so, should the convection pattern on the Pacific side suddenly change, the result would be a crushing blow to Japan. (Komatsu 1977[1973], 81–82) Between fears about the Oil Shock in the heyday of the Cold War, and the internationalization slogans that dominated the high growth period in Japan (“A Bold Leap into the World”), this novel conveyed such realism and significance that it was quickly made into film, TV drama, and even manga, and set off Japan Sinks fever all over the nation. What matters here is that majoring in medieval Italian literature at Kyoto University, Komatsu, from the beginning, hoped to set up a transnational analogy between the Jewish diaspora in history and the possible Japanese diaspora in speculation. Thus, it is Faulkner’s The Wild Palms that helped him narrativize this idea as a novel. Komatsu grew fascinated with The Wild Palms after he came of age—that is, in the year of 1951 or 1952, immediately after the publication of the first Japanese translation of The Wild Palms in 1950 as I clarified above. Thirty-five years later, in the summer of 1987, when he established himself as a bestselling author many of whose works had already been made into big-budget films, Komatsu went so far as to visit the United States to interview Faulkner’s daughter Jill Faulkner Summers at her house in Virginia. Since The Wild Palms is a kind of disaster novel, Komatsu wanted to write another disaster novel dramatizing the submersion of the Japanese archipelago. While Faulkner compared the flood refugees to the passengers of Noah’s Ark, Komatsu compared the submersion of Japan to the sinking of the legendary continent Atlantis. There is no doubt that Faulkner and Komatsu both treated the planetary fate of humanity, and both in times of politico-economic crisis. Furthermore, as Faulkner reconsidered the history of race as the history of sexuality, Komatsu tried to speculate with a fictional analogy between the history of the Jews and the Japanese facing the death of their own country. A character who seems to be a monk states in Chapter 5: The Jews have the experience of a two-thousand-year period of exile. Whereas this island people of ours have had the happy experience of living secure in their own country for a like period. Therefore it would be no easy matter to take on the other role. Would we gain some wisdom from our Diaspora over 364

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the course of the years? And throughout such a period, would the Japanese people remain the Japanese People? (Komatsu 1977[1973], 124) Is it possible for the Japanese to simulate the diaspora of the Jews? This is the greatest philosophical question Komatsu raises in this disaster novel. However, his first novel Nippon ApattchiZoku (The Japanese Apache, published in 1964) also suggests a kind of what I call creative masochism in Full Metal Apache (Tatsumi 2006) whereby the author draws transnational inspiration from historically defeated tribes such as Native Americans and Jews. At this point, the vision of planetarity will lead us to question the artificial discursive framework of ethnicity. Gerald Vizenor once mocked the western racist discourse of “Indian” by calling himself “post-indian,” and I once coined the term “Japanoid” in order to meditate on the rise of a fake Japanese or neoJaponistic or simply Japanophilic culture nicknamed “Cool Japan” and globally cherished by younger Japanese and non-Japanese. In these ways, the discourse of ethnicity has been revealed to be an effect of modern western culture from the beginning. The political stance that remains to us is no more than “strategic essentialism,” as Gayatri Spivak pointed out. In this context, as a born-Catholic Japanese, I feel deep sympathy with Karen Tei Yamashita’s radical critique of the concept of “pure Japanese” in her own prologue to the fourth novel Circle K Cycles (Yamashita 2001). The author herself states: What could it mean to be a ‘pure Japanese?’ I felt hurt and resentment. I came from a country where many people, including my own, had long struggled with the pain of racism and exclusion. Purity of race was not something I valued or believed to be important, and yet, in Japan, I was trying so hard to pass, to belong. (Yamashita 2001, 12) Yamashita’s third novel Tropic of Orange (1997) attempts to displace the tropic of cancer and the Monroe Doctrine’s very order of hemispheres, another project that impresses me as brilliantly planetary. However, what is most striking is that Yamashita’s first two novels, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990) and Brazil-Maru (1992), share so many elements with Sakyo Komatsu’s early novels, especially The Japanese Apache and Japan Sinks. Through the Arc of the Rain Forest describes a new Gold Rush in Matacão, the Brazilian holy land located near the equator, which produces a rigid magnetic polymer capable of mimicking any object. The novel’s hero is Kazumasa Ishimaru, whose bosom friend is a tiny prophetic satellite whizzing inches from the boy’s forehead. This idiosyncratic setting cannot help but remind us of Komatsu’s The Japanese Apache, which transforms the real postwar scrap thieves haunting the Osaka Army factory in Sugiyama-cho between Osaka Castle and the Nekoma River (at one time the largest munition plant in Asia) into a new species of radically cyborgian and weirdly metallivorous post-human beings. As I examined in my own book Full Metal Apache (2006), we should note that this picaresque community originally consisted not simply of Koreans but also of Japanese and Okinawans, ranging from bank robbers and bicycle thieves to getrich-quick schemers. Although it is Japanese journalists who made the analogy between the action of Hollywood “Apache Indian” movies in the 1940s and 1950s and the activities of the postwar Japanese scrap thieves, the self-proclaimed Japanese Apache community consists of multi-ethnic and multi-cultural tribes. However, this abuse of the term “Apache” automatically invites us to notice that the ethnic category of American Indians should have been put into question much earlier. The rise of the Japanese Apache in the Eastern Hemisphere rather convinces us of the fake structure of ethnicity itself. 365

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While Komatsu compared the Japanese and the Jews in Japan Sinks, Yamashita shows a similar interest in diaspora in her second novel Brazil-Maru, which begins with a contemporary version of Exodus. Nonetheless, what strikes one most is not necessarily the fate of Japanese immigrants but the novel’s mysterious denouement, which reinvents ethnicity. Consider this “curious article,” probably from a newspaper, that is quoted in the novel: Three days ago, the so-called Indian of the Lost Tribe was found dead, killed probably while helping himself to someone else’s food or store of hidden goods. He was described as a very slight, bowlegged, unkempt man with long dirty black hair, thin strands falling in a tangled beard from his face. He was found shot through the head and clutching a rusty old carbine, empty except for the red earth pushed into the tip of its disintegrating barrel. (Yamashita 1992, 248) As Kandice Chuh and other critics have pointed out, this mysterious “Indian of the Lost Tribe” is Genji Befu, Part IV’s narrator, a son of Seijiro and Haru Befu and nephew of Kantaro Uno, leader of the Japanese Brazilian community in Esperança. Of course, if one is reading this novel closely, the description of this dead man first conjures up the image of Hachiro Yogu, a dirty and mean trickster who carries a pistol in his belt, and who was rumored to have “lived with the Indians in the Mato Grosso and wandered around with no clothing” (Yamashita 1992, 27–28). However, since at the end of Part IV Genji is involved in a plane crash that kills Kantaro, it is natural for readers to identify this mysterious dead man as Genji, who must have gotten lost in Mato Grasso, a region of the Brazilian forest (Chu 2006, 628). What complicates and disturbs the concept of ethnicity here is that Genji is mistaken for a Native American, a tribe sometimes already believed to belong to one of the “Lost Tribes” of Israel, that is, a tribe of the Jews. When Sakyo Komatsu compared the fate of the Japanese to that of the Jews in Japan Sinks in 1973, it probably reflected the popularity of Isaiah Ben-Dasan a.k.a. Shichihei Yamamoto’s bestseller The Japanese and the Jews, published in 1970 and translated into English in 1972 (tr. Richard L. Gate) (Yamamoto 1972[1970]). In the same way, Karen Tei Yamashita has favored an analogy between the Japanese and the Native Americans. She repeats this analogy in the last section of Circle K Cycles, entitled “Epilogue: Wagahai wa Nikkei de Aru”: And there are plenty of books suggesting that the original Japanese are a lost tribe from Israel. Speaking of tribes, I thought the literal translation of Nikkei is “of the Japanese tribe,” but “real” Japanese never refer to themselves as Nikkei. (Yamashita 2001, 146) At first sight the transgression of ethnic essentialism employed by Komatsu and Yamashita in their critical passing narratives may be disturbing to us epistemologically. However, without accepting this creative abuse of ethnicity and the constructive displacement of hemispheres penetrating the literary heritage ranging from William Faulkner, to Komatsu Sakyo and Karen Tei Yamashita, we cannot comprehend the potential of the post-hemispheric transnational imagination and the planetarity of the post-Monroe Doctrine frame of reference. This perspective, at first glance, may seem to be a small step for comparative literature, but is actually one giant leap for transnational American literary history. Now let me conclude the chapter by empowering the sense of transchronological strategy instrumental to transnational studies. In the wake of postcolonialism, especially of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent Iraq War, we have witnessed the rise of Transnational 366

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American Studies, if not anti-American studies, as represented by Spivak’s “Planetarity,” Dimock’s “Deep Time,” and Murphy’s “Hemispheric Imaginings” as I have mentioned time and again in this chapter. Their ideas undoubtedly helped decenter and reconstruct America from different perspectives cultivated in non-American countries located in the non-western hemisphere. What matters most here, however, is the creative interactions between a transnational approach and transchronological strategy. For example, as distinguished New Historicist Michael T. Gilmore pointed out in War on Words by quoting Rafael Campo’s opening lines of “Patriotic Poem” (“The war on words had been declared: A voice / was considered dangerous / and could be confiscated by police”), “the climate of intimidation adopted in the United States after the invasion of Iraq” and “the perilous state of civil liberties under the Bush administration” (Gilmore 2010, 12), which censored free speech, cannot help but remind us of what had happened in Antebellum America characterized by the gag rule oppressing the discourse of abolitionism. Although Gilmore himself found it necessary to defend himself against “the charge of anachronism” (Gilmore 2010, 12), I find this kind of transchronological strategy indispensable for promoting transnational Americanism. Otherwise, it is safe to say that Gilmore’s creative anachronism had already been fully supported by what William Faulkner stated in an open letter “To the Youth of Japan” written after his first and last visit to Japan in 1955. In this letter he set up a surprisingly trans-hemispheric and trans-historical analogy between the South, the defeated nation in the Civil War, he is descended from and Japan, the defeated nation in the Second World War, dreaming the day out of Japan’s disaster and despair “will come a group of Japanese writers whom all the world will want to listen to, who will speak not a Japanese truth but a universal truth,” transfiguring the experience of defeat into the creative imagination (Faulkner 1956, 187). Of course, hard-core Faulknerians would like to regard the author’s sense of the past as the very incubator for his apocryphal imagination without which he could not have published the Yoknapatowpha Saga. Nonetheless, what attracts me here is the beautiful resonance between his creative anachronism and creative analocism, paving the way for the interlock between the transnational and the transchronological, which will undoubtedly motivate American Studies to come.

Notes 1 “A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America in general Congress assembled, 28 June 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified June 13, 2018, http://founders. archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-04-02-0139-0002. [Original source: The Adams Papers, Papers of John Adams, vol. 4, February–August 1776, ed. Robert J. Taylor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979, 345–351.] emphasis added. 2 Pages 11–26; http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/documents_gw/farewell/transcript.html. 3 http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29465. Emphasis mine. 4 See Tom Wolfe, “The Doctrine that Never Died,” New York Times [January 30, 2005] https://www. nytimes.com/2005/01/30/opinion/the-doctrine-that-never-died.html. 5 Wolfe 2005. 6 According to Wolfe, Bush’s speech seems to expand the global reach: “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.” (Wolfe 2005) 7 “Mississippi River Flood of 1927,” https://www.britannica.com/event/Mississippi-Riverflood-of-1927.

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Takayuki Tatsumi Brown, Robert Marshall. “The Mississippi River from Cape Girardeau to the Head of the Passes.” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 34. 5 (1902): 371–383. Chu, Kandice. “Of Hemispheres and Other Spheres: Navigating Karen Tei Yamashita’s Literary World.” American Literary History 18. 3 (Fall 2006): 618–637. Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Dimcock, Wai Chee, and Lawrence Buell. Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Endo, Shusaku. Shikai no Hotori (Beside the Dead Sea). Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1973. Faulkner, William. If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [The Wild Palms]. Ed. Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk. New York: The Library of America, 1990[1939]. Translated by Yasuo Okubo. Tokyo: Hibiya Shuppannsha, 1950; Tokyo: Mikasa Shobo, 1951. Faulkner, William. Sanctuary. Translated by Naotaro Tatsunokuchi and Masami Nishikawa. Tokyo: Getsuyo Shobo, 1950[1931]. Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. Translated by Masao Takahashi. Tokyo: Mikasa Shobo, 1954 [1929]. Faulkner, William. Pylon. Translated by Kenzaburo Ohashi. Tokyo: David Publishers, 1954[1935]. Faulkner, William. Faulkner at Nagano. Edited by Robert A. Jelliffe. Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1956. Faulkner, William. Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner 1926–1962. Eds. James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate. New York: Random House, 1968. Fliegelman, Jay. Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Gilmore, Michael T. The War on Words: Slavery, Race, and Free Speech in American Literature. Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2010. Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. “The Gulf of Mexico System and the ‘Latinness’ of New Orleans,” American Literary History 18. 3 (Fall 2006): 468–495. Hart, Gary. James Monroe. New York: Times Books, 2005. Hotta, Yoshie. Jikan (Time). Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1955. Huang, Yunte. Yoru no Mori (Nightwood). Tokyo: Dainippon-Yubenkai Kodansha, 1955. Huang, Yunte. Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Jefferson, Thomas. “A Declaration by the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled.” Founders Online, National Archives, June 13, 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/ documents/Adams/06-04-02-0139-0002. Komatsu, Sakyo. Nippon Apache-Zoku (The Japanese Apache). Tokyo: Kobunsha, 1964. Komatsu, Sakyo. Nippon Chimbotsu (Japan Sinks). Tr. Michael Gallagher. London: New English Library, 1977[1973]. Kuwahara, Takeo. Bungaku Nyumon (A Reader’s Guide to Literature). Tokyo: Iwanami Publishers, 1950. Millgate, Michael. The Achievement of William Faulkner. London: Constable, 1965. Monroe, James. “The Seventh Annual Message to Congress.” 2018. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/ index.php?pid=29465. Murphy, Gretchen. Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Oe, Kenzaburo. Kouzui wa Waga Tamashii ni Oyobi (The Flood Invades My Soul). Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1973. Okihiro, Gary. Island World: A History of Hawaii and the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Pearcy, Matthew T. “After the Flood: a History of the 1928 Flood Control Act.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 95. 2 (Summer 2002): 172–201. Ravitch, Diane. The American Reader. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991. Richardson, James D. A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents—James Monroe. Charleston: Bibliobazaar, 2006. Spanos, William V. Shock & Awe: American Exceptionalism and the Imperatives of the Spectacle in Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2014. Spivak, Gayatri. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Tatsumi, Takayuki. Full Metal Apache: Transactions between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. New York: The Library of America, 1982[1883].

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Thinking after the hemispheric Washington, George. “Farewell Address.” Ed. Ravitch, Diane. The American Reader. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991. 37–41. Wolfe, Tom. “The Doctrine That Never Died.” New York Times, January 30, 2005. nytimes.com/2005/ 01/30/opinion/30wolfe.html?pagewanted=2. Yamashita, Karen Tei. Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1990. Yamashita, Karen Tei. Brazil-Maru. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1992. Yamashita, Karen Tei. Tropic of Cancer. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1997. Yamashita, Karen Tei. Circle K Cycles. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2001.

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Adams, John 151, 152–3, 156, 234–5 Africa Must Unite (Nkrumah) 262–3 African Americans: missionaries 186–7, 256, 259; public lynchings in American South and Nazi persecution of Jews 285; see also Ethiopianism in Pauline Hopkin’s Of One Blood; music; slavery; entries beginning black African independence movements 254–65 African origins: negritude and transnational indigenitude 116 African Union 263 Africans and Palestinians 331–2 After the Last Sky (Said) 63–4, 66, 68 Algiers 96, 97–8, 99–101 Allen, Chadwick 106, 107, 114, 117, 120 Allewaert, Monique 58 Allison, Robert J. 97 Alvarez, Julia 33 The American (James) 307–10 American Arts and Craft Movement 177 The American Captive (Ellison) 101–3 American exceptionalism 42, 66, 99, 359; poetics 272–4; visual intertextuality 282–7 American humanism 61–2, 63 American Literature Society of Japan 167 American Presidents see presidents American Studies Association (ASA) 2, 14, 203–4, 211, 329–30, 335 [!]Americano! album (Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers) 323–4 America’s Asia (Lye) 73 amnesia see forgiveness and forgetting; Guam; memory/amnesia amnesty, imaginative 274–6 Analects (Confucius) 153, 160

ancient civilizations 194, 195, 196, 197, 274 Anderson, Benedict 54–5 Angola, missionaries in 187–8 Animal’s People (Sinha) 352–4 “Annabel Lee” (Poe), Spanish translation of 145 “Antipodean Manifesto” (Smith) 36 antipodean transnationalism 36–7 Apartheid Archive Project, South Africa 268–9 Apollo 11 moon landing 217 Appadurai, Arjun 32 Appeal (Walker) 196 Arac, Jonathan 203 archipelagic American Studies 51–9; definition 53; see also Guam; entries beginning Pacific archives: Barbary Wars narratives 98; organzing amnesia 266–72; Performance Studies approach 88 Arendt, Hannah 68, 277, 302 Aristide, President of Haiti 129–30 Armah, Kwesi 258–9 Armitage, David 36 Arnott, Nellie 187, 188 artist-activists 335 “Arts in the Contact Zone” (Pratt) 33 Asia as Method (Chen) 35 Asian American Studies see Pacific turn Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders 76, 340 Asian Tiger economies 72 Atlantic: “Black Atlantic” paradigm 31, 34, 331; as symbolic presence in cultural history 31 Atwood, Margaret 204, 206, 208, 210 The Australian Scapegoat (Fuller) 36 authoritarian populism see right-wing populism authorship, decentralized concepts of 45–7 “autobiografiction” 204

370

Index autobiographies: and criticism 204–11; political 266–7, 269–70, 271, 272–6 “autocritography” 205, 209–11 Autry Museum of the American West 108, 241 Bacigalupi, Paolo 349–51 Badiou, Alain 302 Balibar, Etienne 35 Barbary Wars 96–9; in American drama 99–103 Batongbacal, Jay 59 Bauerkemper, Joseph 110 Bauman, Zygmunt 302 Bazin, Andre 312–13 Beilharz, Peter 36 Beisho Dayori (Monthly Review of American Books), Japan 165–6, 167 Bellah, Robert N. 160 Benjamin, Walter 271, 311 Beside the Dead Sea (Endo) 362–3 Bhabha, H. K. 35, 127, 203 Bhopal chemical disaster, India 349, 353–4 Bible see under Christianity Bigsby, Christopher 202 Black Americans and Palestinians 327, 330–2, 333 “Black Atlantic” paradigm 31, 34, 331 “Black Lives Matter” movement 276, 277, 333 black transnationalism see Ethiopianism in Pauline Hopkin’s Of One Blood Bonalde, Pérez 140–1; “El cuervo” (“The Raven”) 141–5 boom boxes/cassette recordings 131–2 “boomerang effect” of environmental destruction 348, 352–3 border crossing: concept of 107, 203–4; indigenous trajectories 108–14 borders 35–6; see also Mexico-US border Bosnian war 301–2 Bourdieu, Pierre 128 Bourne, Randolph 42, 203 Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement 329 Bradley, David 12, 14, 22 Brazil-Maru (Yamashita) 366 Breytenbach, Breyten 275, 277 Britain/England 32, 139 British chinoiserie: willow pattern 174–6 Builes, Rubén 15, 16, 17 Bush, Barbara 239 Bush, George W.: administration 9, 10; Monroe Doctrine and “Bush Doctrine” 359; political narrative 289 Bush, Sr., George 239 Butler, Judith 62, 66, 67–8, 86, 88–9, 311, 328 Butler, Octavia 352 Cambodia: Chong indigenous community 106, 107 Campbell, Karlyn 233

Campo, Rafael 367 Canclini, Néstor Garcia 317 capitalism 42, 110–11, 128–9 The Captive Mind (Milosz) 297–8 Cardinal, Cliff 112–13 Caribbean 33–4, 47, 52–3, 55, 59; Crees of the Caribbean (Taylor) 108–9; Haitian vodou: bonds in diaspora 129–32 Carter, Jimmy 237–8 cassette recordings/boom boxes 131–2 Cather, Willa 55–6, 57 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 164, 168 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 37 Chamberlain, Basil Hall 179 Chamorro peoples and language, Guam 339–40, 342–3, 344 Cheadle, Mary 149, 150, 151, 152 Cheah, Pheng 37–8 Chen, Kuan-Hsing 35 China: “America at War and Peace” conference 9–10; rise of 350–1; US intervention 71–2; see also Confucius and America (moral constitution of statecraft) Chinese American authors 34, 210 Chinese boxes 176 Chinese language and translations 15, 148–52, 153–4 Chinese Railroad Workers in North American Project 17–21 The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (Fenollosa) 148–9 Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (Honour) 175 Chong community, Cambodia 106, 107 Christianity: in Africa 254, 256–7, 259–60; African American spirituals: Fisk Jubilee Singers 132–4; Bible and US foreign policy 328; biblical references to Ethiopia 194, 195, 196, 197; biblical tone of Obama autobiography 273; and Confucianism 156; Puritans and Zionism 66; see also missionaries Chuh, Kandice 72, 75–6 Circle K Cycles (Yamashita) 365, 366 Civil Rights Movement 89, 255, 260 Clifford, James 116–17 climate change 36–7, 348, 350 Clinton, Bill: administration 203; Lewinsky scandal 243 Clinton, Hillary 34, 243, 293 Clyne, Roger (Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers) 323–4 Coetzee, J. M. 38 Cohen, Michael A. 290 Cold War: Africa 258–9, 261, 262; Asian American Studies 74; Guam 340; Japan 164–5; Orientalism 164, 169; post-apocalyptic narratives 348; Soviet Union, containment theory 359

371

Index collaborative approach: “America at War and Peace” conference, China 9–10; Chinese Railroad Workers in North American Project, Stanford University 17–21; Kyoto conference of Japanese Association of American Studies 10–11; Mark Twain Anthology 14–17; other projects 21–4; see also Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) colonialism/imperialism: African independence movements and Emancipation 254–65; Archipelagic American Studies 51–9; Dutch 134; French 46, 130, 131; impacts of structural appropriation 347–9, 352–3; mimicry 127; Native American intergenerational memory 110–11; “post-colonial imperialism” 358–9; Zionism 66–8, 328–30; see also Guam; Pacific turn; Palestine/Palestinians; Spanish colonialism The Color Curtain (Wright) 58 Columbus, Christopher: engraving 217, 218 Common Sense (Paine) 51–2 comparative literary studies and worlding approach 43–4 computer age, symbolic forms of 291–2 Confucius and America (moral constitution of statecraft): Ezra Pound 148–52, 155, 157–8, 160; and the Founding Fathers 152–8, 160; twenty-first century institutes 158–60 Confucius Institutes 159–60 Confucius Sinarum Philosophus 153, 154, 158 Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) 168–9 A Connecticutt Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Twain) 16–17 Conquergood, D. 86 Consejo Fronterizo de Arte y Cultura (COFAC), Tijuana 316 Constitution 156–7 contact zones see cultural performance Conway, Kellyanne 293–4 Couser, Thomas 273 cowboy image of presidential candidates 241, 242 Crees of the Caribbean (Taylor) 108–9 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 334 Critical Keywords in Literary and Cultural Theory (Wolfrey) 184 Cronin, Thomas 234 Cuba see Guantánamo Cuban poet see Martí, José “El cuervo” (“The Raven”) (Bonalde) 141–4 Cullers, Patrice 276 cultural competition and diplomacy, China 159 cultural and economic exchange 34–6 cultural performance: concepts and crossroads 85–7; Emancipation Day/West India Day, Rochester, New York 85, 87–90, 93; Liberation Day and Volkfest: Grafenwoehr and Flossesnbuerg Concentration Camp Memorial

85, 90–3; study of transnational crossroads and processes 93–4 cultural and transnational turns 286–7 Culture, Information and Education (CI&E/CIE) libraries, American Centers, Japan 164, 165 Cumings, Bruce 34 dance: Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Centre (CPDRC), Philippines 126–9; Chong people, Cambodia 106; “Storm Dance”, Japan 177–8; Volkfest, Germany 92 Darío, Rubén 144 Davie, Donald 150 Declaration of Independence 155–6, 235, 357, 358–9 “decolonial pluriversality” 63 Delany, Martin 196, 197 Deleuze, Giles 311; and Guattari, Felix 42 democracy: African independence movements 254–65; European perspective on Trump’s America 297–9, 301, 302 Deng Xiaoping 158 Derrida, Jacques 47–8, 65, 266–7, 268, 269–70, 271, 273, 274–6, 277–8, 311 descriptive translational studies (DTS) 140 diaspora: and Haitian vodou 129–32; Jewish and Japanese 364–5, 366; Pacific islanders 36, 339, 340, 343; statelessness 62–3 Diaspora (Espiritu) 186 Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock 93, 101 Dillon, Grace 348–9, 354 Dillon, Wilton S. 157 Dimock, Wai Chee 341, 367 Dirilik, Arif 71 dispossession, shared histories of 64, 66–8 Dogeaters (Hagedorn) 33 Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (Piatote) 189 Dominican Republic 33 Douglass, Frederick 22, 88, 195, 196, 255 drama/theatre: Barbary Wars in 99–103; Native American 108–14 “The Dream of a Summer Day” (Hearn) 179, 180–1 Drushel, Bruce E. 190 Du Bois, W. E. B. 31, 58, 133, 331 Duncan, Norman 268–9 Dutch colonialism 134 Dzurec, David 98 Eakin, Paul John 207, 208 East is West and West is East (Kuo) 186 East–West differences: authoritarianism and democracy 297–8; Declaration of Independence 357, 358–9; and Eurasian heritage 174; European Old World and “Western Barbarians” 307–10

372

Index eating, cross-cultural 92–3 The Economist 290 Ecuador: Shuar poetry 123, 124 education in Africa 259–60 Egyptians, ancient 195, 196, 197 Ellison, James 101–3 Emancipation Day, Rochester, New York 85, 87–90, 93 Emancipation Declaration 257–8 Emperor Tching Tang 151, 152 Endo, Shusaku 362–3 English language: Africa 254–5, 256–7; and Chamorro language 342–3; and multilingualism: Global Indigenous Studies 120, 124; pejorative definitions of insular/ islands 51–2, 58–9; and Spanish language: songs 323–4 English–Spanish translations see Poe, Edgar Alan (translated in 1880s New York) Enlightenment 153–4, 156, 160 environmental destruction see post-apocalyptic narratives Espiritu, Augusto 186 Esplin, E. and de Gato, M. V. 22–3 Ethiopianism in Pauline Hopkin’s Of One Blood 193–4; blueprint for transcontinental black identity 195–7; transnational blackness 197; transnational spaces and the black woman 198–200 Ethnic America: A History (Sowell) 202 Eurasian identity see Watanna, Onoto: A Japanese Nightingale Europe and China 159 Europe and US: intertextuality 284–6; Monroe Doctrine 359; Old World and “Western Barbarians” 307–10; private sphere in politics 243–9 European perspective on Trump’s America: election, truth and liberal democracy 298–9; future of European–US relations 303–4; history of heroic/celebrity presidents 299–301; ignorance of Americans 297–8, 301–2; reality inertia 301–3 European Vision and the South Pacific (Smith) 36 Evans, Michael A. W. 226, 241, 242 Everett, David 103 exiles: Latin American 140–1; Palestinian 62–6, 67–8 The Fall of the Public Man (Sennett) 243–4 family values and presidential candidates 238–9 “farmer” image of presidents 236, 241 Faulkner, William: The Wild Palms 359–62; influence in Japan 362–4 Felski, Rita 41, 44, 45, 48 feminist writing 208–10, 321–2 Fenollosa, Ernest 148–9

festivals see cultural performance; Medellín poetry festival Fiedler, Lesley 307–9 film/movies: First Nations 354–5; Western 311–14 Filo, John Paul: Kent State University anti-war protest shootings 222, 223 First Family 239–41 First Nations 107–8; film 354–5; theatre 108–9, 111–13 The Fisher-boy Urashima (Chamberlain) 179 Fishkin, Shelley Fisher 2, 106–7, 203–4, 211, 228, 330 Fisk Jubilee Singers 132–4 The Flood Invades My Soul (Oe) 362–3 Flossenbuerg Concentration Camp Memorial, Liberation Day celebrations 85, 90–3 Fluck, Winfried 42, 43, 249 Folkerts, Hendrick 106, 107 Ford, John 309–10, 311–12 forgiveness and forgetting: exceptionalist poetics 272–4; hauntology 276–8; imaginative amnesty 274–6; organizing amnesia 266–72 Founding Fathers 152–8, 160 France: colonialism 46, 130, 131; early texts 45, 46; Enlightenment philosophers 153; liberal front and fascism 303; Twain scholars 23; US political culture and private lives of leaders 244, 245–7, 249 Franklin, Benjamin 153, 154–6, 157 Franklin, Thomas E.: 9/11 Ground Zero 219 Fraser, Gordon 348 freedom: Lincoln as symbol of 254–65; songs 89, 133; transnational allegories see Barbary Wars freemasonry in Africa 195, 196 Freud, Sigmund 67, 274, 277 Friedman, Susan Stanford 77 Frisbie, Florence 54 from unincorporated territory (Perez) 339, 342–4 Fujikane, Candice 76–7 Full Metal Apache (Tatsumi) 365 Fuller, Loie 178 Fuller, Peter 36 Garvey, Marcus 195, 260 geishas: A Japanese Nightingale (Watanna) 173, 177, 178; and subservient image of Japan 169–70 gender 183–91; male authorial hierarchy 152, 155–6; and race 99–102, 186–8, 321–2, 327, 334–5; see also women Gender and History (journal) 185 Gender History in Transnational Perspective (Janz and Schönpflug) 184–5, 188 Gensing, Patrick 289–90 Germany: Brandenburg Gate, Berlin 228; Flossenbuerg Concentration Camp Memorial:

373

Index Liberation Day celebrations 85, 90–3; indigenous art show, Kassel 106; Kristallnacht and public lynchings in American South 285; right wing populism 288, 289–91, 293, 294; US political culture and privacy 232, 233, 244, 247–9 Gettysburg Address 256–7 Ghana 254, 258–9, 260–1, 262 Giles, Paul 42, 46 Gillman, Susan 196–7 Gilman, Susan and Gruesz, Kirsten S. 43, 44, 45 Gilmore, Michael T. 367 Gilroy, Paul 31, 32, 38, 132, 331 Glissant, Eduard 33–4, 37, 52–3, 55, 58–9 Global Indigenous Studies 120 Global South 349, 350, 355 globalization 35–6, 42, 183–4, 203, 349 Gore, Al 239 Gore, Tipper 239 Grafenwoehr and Flossenbuerg Concentration Camp Memorial, Germany 85, 90–3 Great Mississippi Flood (1927) 360–1 Greco-Roman civilizations 194, 197, 274 Grewal, Inderpal 184 Gruesz, Kirsten Silva 361–2 Guam 338–9; deep strata of archipelagic history 339–40; “poemaps” 342–4; remapping the “new” in American literary studies 340–2; unmapping into the Préterrain 344–5 Guantánamo: post 9/11 use 340–1 Gubar, Susan 204, 206, 207, 208–9, 210 Guttenberg, Karl-Theodor zu 247–9 Hagedorn, Jessica 33 Haitian vodou 129–32 Halberstam, Judith 184 Hall, Prince 195 Hamilton, Carolyn 268 Hammad, Suheir 335 Haraway, Donna J. 38 Harrington, Paula 23 Hart, Gary 243 hauntology 276–8 Hawai’i 57, 59, 72; Asian settler colonialism 76–7; missionaries 187–8; Perez in 342, 343, 344, 345 Hayden, Benjamin Ross 354–5 Hearn, Lafcadio 179, 180–1 Hedges, Elaine 22 Heidegger, Martin 43 Heise, Ursula 203, 211 hemispheric studies 32, 74; see also “planetary expanse of transnational American writing” Hemon, Alexsandar 301–2 Heridia, Juanita 186 heroic/celebrity presidents, history of 299–301 high culture and popular culture dichotomy 310

Highway, Tomson 109–10, 111–12 Hill, Roberta 123–4 Höcke, Björn 290–1 Hogue, Michael 355 Holtz-Bacha, Christina 244, 249 Hong, Caroline Kyungah 12, 13 Honour, Hough 175 Hopkins, Pauline see Ethiopianism in Pauline Hopkin’s Of One Blood Hornung, Alfred 203, 330, 335 Hotta, Yoshi 363 Houdon, Jean-Antoine 235–6 How the García Girls Lost their Accents (Alvarez) 33 Hu Jintao 159 Huckleberry Finn (Twain) 14, 15, 16 Huff (Cardinal) 112–13 Huhndorf, Shari 107, 114 humanism, American 61–2, 63 Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and Hurricane Emily, Yucatan Peninsula 362 Hybrid Cultures (Canclini) 317–18 Hyoronsha publishers, Japan 166–7 “I Have a Dream” speech (King) 129 iconography and interpictoriality: “American identity” and concept of interpictoriality 220–3; history of arrivals 117–20; official portraits and photographs of Presidents 224–8; tracing and mapping clusters 223, 228–9 ignorance of Americans 297–8, 301–2 Imagine Otherwise (Chuh) 75–6 Immigrant Acts (Lowe) 73 immigration/migration: Asian Amerians 73–4; and gender 185–6; Indian IT professionals 190–1; novels 33; US-Mexican border wall 229 Impossible Subjects (Ngai) 73 Independence Day 87 independence movements, Africa 254–65 India: Bhopal chemical disaster 349, 353–4 Indian IT professionals 190–1 indigenous peoples: acts of mapping 106–8; border-crossings in drama 108–14; impacts of environmental destruction/structural appropriation 348, 352–3; see also trans-indigenitude (international circuits of poetry); specific groups Indonesia 54, 55; Bandung Conference 58 industrial production, Tijuana 318–20 Innu poetry 121–3, 124 Insular Cases, US Supreme Court 52, 339–40 insular/insularity, pejorative definitions of 51–2, 58–9 “intergenerational continuity and community” 110–11 interpictoriality see iconography and interpictoriality intersectionality 99–102, 186–8, 321–2, 327, 334–5

374

Index intertextuality 284–6 “Intifada, USA” (Jordan) 327 intifada as resistance to colonialism 332–3 intra-Asian differentiation/relations 76, 77 Islam 98–9, 334 Islamic culture and Twain translation 16 Islamic Orientalism 328 Islamophobia 288, 291 Island World (Okihiro) 362 island-openings 52–4, 55, 58 isolationism and non-interference policy (1796) 358 Israel/Palestine see Palestine iterativity of cultural forms 311 Jackson, Michael: Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Centre (CPDRC), Philippines 126–9 James, Henry 307–10 Jameson, Fredric 35, 107 Janz, Oliver and Schönpflug, Daniel 184–5, 188 Japan: Guam bombing and US military staging area 338–9; imperialism 74–6; Kyoto conference of Japanese Association of American Studies 10–11; and Mexico 359; Okinawa 344, 345; US intervention 71, 72; US marines, Iwo Jima (1945) 219, 220; US popular culture in 33 Japan Craze (Japonisme) 173 Japan Mark Twain Society 11–12 Japan (postwar literature) 164–5; influence of William Faulkner 362–6; Kawabata as Cold War modernist 168–71; promotion of American literature 165–7; translation of Japanese literature 167–8 Japan Sinks (Komatsu) 362–3, 364–5 “The Japanese in America” (Watanna) 174 The Japanese Apache (Komatsu) 365 A Japanese Nightingale see Watanna, Onoto Japanese–English translations 167–8, 179 Jefferson, Thomas 153, 156, 157, 235, 357 Jeffrey, Julie Roy 87 Jenn, Ronald 23 Jesuit missionaries/scholars, China 151, 153, 154, 156, 158, 160 Jews: and Japanese diaspora 364–5, 366; Nazi persecution and racism in American South 285; Yiddish language and translations 15; Zionism 66–8, 328–30 Joaquin, Nick 57 “John Brown’s Body” 133, 134 Johnson, Lyndon B. 225, 226 Jordan, June 327, 330–1, 334–5 Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) 2, 184; founding 12–14; online 11–12; transpacific rise 76; Twain translations 14–15 Justice, Daniel Heath 109, 113–14

Kadir, Djelal 43, 44 Kanzler, Katja and Scharlaj, Marina 292–3 Kaplan, Amy 330, 340–1; and Pease, Donald 73 Kawabata, Yasunari 168–71 Kennedy, Chuck: photograph of Obama 224–6 Kennedy, John F.: Berlin speech 228; family life 240, 243; and media images of European leaders 247–9; and Nixon TV debate 299–300; as “super-man”/“existential hero” 300–1 Kennedy, Ted 242, 243 Kent State University anti-war protest shootings 222, 223 Kenya 257–8, 273–4 Kerr-Ritchie, Jeffrey R. 87, 88 Keywords for American Cultural Studies (Burgett and Hendler) 184 Keywords (Williams) 183 Kim, Elaine 72 Kim, Jodi 74 King, Jr., Martin Luther 129, 260 Kingston, Maxine Hong 210 Knopf series of Japanese literature 168 Komatsu, Sakyo 362–3, 364–5, 366 Korea: Japanese colonialism 76; North 339 Korean American novels 75 Kristeva, Julia 37 Ku Klux Klan 285 Kuo, Karen 186 Lambert, Frank 97–8 language: bilingualism and dialects 32–3; multilingualism/bilanguaging 119–20, 124, 321–2; see also specific languages Latin/Spanish America see Poe, Edgar Alan (translated in 1880s New York); trans-indigenitude (international circuits of poetry) leadership see Founding Father; presidents Lebanon 327, 334–5 Lee, Rachel C. 74, 76 Leibniz, Georg Wilhelm 154 Leibovitz, Annie 245 Levander, Caroline 44; and Levine, Robert S. 41–2 Levitt, Peggy 33 Lewinsky, Monica 243 LGBT Transnational Identity and the Media (Pullen) 189–90 Liberation Day: Flossenbuerg Concentration Camp Memorial, Germany 85, 90–3 Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, et al. 73–4 Lincoln: African independence movements and African Americans 254–65 Lincoln Leadership Prize 264 Lincoln Memorial 255, 260–1 Lincoln University, Pennsylvania 254, 256, 258, 259–60 Lipset, Seymour Martin 282

375

Index literary criticism see autobiographies, and criticism La loca de la casa (Montero) 204, 206–7, 210 Lordon, Frédéric 128–9 Lowe, Lisa 73, 184 Lye, Colleen 73 Lyons, Scott Richard 107–8 McCarthy, Cormack 349–50, 351–2 McGlennen, Molly 120–1, 122 Macron, Emmanuel 246–7 Madam Butterfly: and A Japanese Nightingale (Watanna) 173, 176–7, 179; and Snow Country (Kawabata) 169–70 Madison, James 156 Mailer, Norman 300 Majid, Anouar 99 “Make America Great Again” (Trump) 301 “Make It New” (Pound) 148, 150–1, 152, 156, 157–8 Mandela, Nelson: autobiography 266, 267, 269, 270, 272, 274–6; death of 269; and Mkentane 257; and Obama 1, 277 Mangaogang, A. 126–7, 128 Mangcu, Xolela 269, 271, 272–3 Manhattan (Nagle) 110–11 Manovich, Lev 291–2 Mao Zedong 158 Marcus, Greil and Sollors, Werner 338, 340–1 Mariscal, Ignacio 142, 143 Martí, José 15, 16–17, 140–1; “The Raven” (Poe) 144–6 Martinsen, Eric 12, 13 Masalha, Nur 328 “Me and My Shadow” (Tompkins) 205 Medellín poetry festival 119–24 media: Clinton–Lewinsky scandal 243; politics as spectacle 300; private sphere in European politics 243–9; social 244, 246, 290 “Memory and the Archive in Contemporary Life Writing” 272 memory/amnesia: authoritarian populism in US and Europe 301–3; Native American intergenerational 110–11; see also forgiveness and forgetting; Guam “The Men Who Prey” (Steward) 56–8 Merkel, Angela 303 Mestokosho, Rita 121–2, 124 Métis indigenous peoples 354–5 Metzelaar, Helen 133, 134 Mexico: Archipelagic American Studies 55; and China 350–1; Crees in the Caribbean (Taylor) 108–9; indigenous writers’ organization (ELIAC) 119; and Japan 359; Transnational Studies collaboration 22 Mexico-US border: transa and “transa techniques” 316–24; wall 229 Meynard, Thierry 153, 158

military interests, US: Middle East 97, 328; Pacific region 219, 220, 338–9, 340, 344, 345; see also Cold War Milosz, Czeslaw 297–8 Miss Numè of Japan (Watanna) 178 Miss Ulysses from Puka-Puka (Frisbie) 54 missionaries 46; African American 186–7, 256, 259; Jesuit, in China 151, 153, 154, 156, 158, 160 Mississippi River floods, history of 359–62 Mitchell, Timothy et al. 328, 332 Mitchell, W. J. T. 220–1 Mkentane, Lincoln 257 “The Modern Essay” (Woolf) 205–6 Modernism and Popular Music (Schleifer) 310 Modernity at Large (Appadurai) 32 Mohr, Jean 63–6 Monroe, James 358 Monroe Doctrine 358–9, 361–2, 365 Montero, Rosa 204, 206–7, 210 Montezemolo, Fiamma et al. 316–17 Monument Valley, landscape of 311–12 moon landing: Apollo 11 217 moral constitution of statecraft see Confucius and America moral role-model, president as 234–8, 242–3 Morrison, Toni 273, 277 movies see film/movies Mullen, Bill V. 329–30 Mullen, Harryette 321–2 multicultural heritage, US 61–2 multilingual poetry 119–24, 321–2 Murphy, Gretchen 359, 367 Muse and Drudge (Mullen) 321–2 music 126–7; African American blues 314; African American freedom songs 89, 133; African American spirituals: Fisk Jubilee Singers 132–4; Haitian vodou 129–32; high culture and popular culture dichotomy 310; hip-hop/rap, Palestine 335; Mexico-US border 323–4; Michael Jackson and Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Centre (CPDRC), Philippines 126–9; weeping koto, Japan 177, 178 My Ántonia (Cather) 55–6, 57 My Bondage My Freedom (Douglass) 195, 196 “My School of Thought” (Mestokosho) 121–2 mythology and art 312–14 Nagle, Mary Kathryn 110–11 Nakanishi, Don T. 77 national flag 218–20 National Security Council (NSC) 169 national symbol, president as 233–8 national unity 270 nationalism: Abiayala (Latin American) 118, 119; African independence movements 254–65;

376

Index Black Americans and Palestinians 331; and Native American literature/identities 117–18, 120–1; Southeast Asia 54–5; Trump 301 Nations Without Nationalism (Kristeva) 37 Native Americans: drama/theater 108–14; gender roles and conflict 189; and Japanese 365, 366; and Palestinians 335; Post Apocalypse Stress Syndrome 348–9, 355; scholars 117; storytelling 45–6, 47, 354; and “transnational turn” 106–8 Native Earth Performing Arts 108 Native Hubs (Ramirez) 109 Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Atwood) 204, 206, 208, 210 negritude and indigènitude 116 neoliberalism: Global South 349, 350; and markets 299; “throw-away labor” 352 Netherlands 285; see also Dutch colonialism networks: archipelagic 58; indigenous peoples 109–10, 116–17, 118, 119–20; interpictoriality 222; texts and relationships see worlding America (literature and culture) “New Americanists” 286 New Orleans 361–2 Ngai, Mae M. 73 9/11 incidents: Barbary Wars analogy 96, 97–9; Guantánamo 340–1; photograph of Ground Zero (Franklin) 219 Nippon Apatchi Zoku (The Japanese Apache) (Komatsu) 365 Nippon Chimbotsu (Japan Sinks) (Komatsu) 362–3, 364–5 Nishikawa, Masami 166 Nixon, Richard: final days of presidency 364; and Kennedy TV debate 299–300 Nixon, Rob 348, 349, 350, 353 Nkrumah, Kwame 254, 259, 260–1, 262–3 Nobel Prize 5, 168, 170, 171, 226, 363 Nolan, Yvette 112, 113–14 Noli Me Tángere (Rizal) 54–5 Nolin, Catherine 185 North Africa see Barbary Wars North Korea 339 The Northlander (Hayden) 354–5 The North Star (newspaper) 88, 89 Novak, Michael 234 Nyerere, Julius 258 Nyongo’o, Lupita 200 Obama, Barack 1–2; on American exceptionalism 283–4, 286–7; autobiography 266, 267, 272–4; and black Americans 276; and Lincoln 264; and Macron 246–7; and Mandela 1, 277; photographs 224–8, 246; political narrative 289; public perception of 234 Obama, Michelle 240–1 Obligado, Carlos 142–3, 144–5

Oe, Kenzaburo 362–3 Of One Blood (Hopkins) see Ethiopianism in Pauline Hopkin’s Of One Blood Okihiro, Gary Y. 362 Okinawa, Japan 344, 345 One Belt One Road initiative, China 160 “one of us” concept of presidential candidates 238–9 Onedia community, Wisconsin 123–4 Organic Act (1950) 340 Oriental vs. Occidental dichotomy and Eurasian heritage 174 Orientalism: Cold War 169; Islamic 328 Orientalism (Said) 98 The Origin of Races and Color (Delany) 196, 197 Pacific Islanders 76; diaspora 36, 339, 340, 343 Pacific Spectator 167 Pacific turn: boundaries, history, and debates 71–2; polycentric transpacific 76–8; transnational turn, immigrant, US imperialism 73–4; US-centric approaches and Japanese imperialism 74–6 Paine, Thomas 51–2, 58, 156, 157, 235 Palestine/Palestinians 327; and American studies 329–30; contemporary transnational colonization of 328–9; exiles/statelessness 62–6, 67–8; intersectionality 334–5; intifada as resistance to colonialism 332–3; transnational perspectives on decolonization 330–2 Panama Canal construction (1904—1914) 362 Panofsky, Erwin 221–2, 313 Park, Robert E. 57 Parker, Richard 97 “Pauline Hopkins and the Occult: African-American Revisions of Nineteenth Century Sciences” (Gillman) 196–7 Pease, Donald 42, 286; Kaplan, Amy and 73; Shu, Yuan and 74 PEGIDA 288, 289–90, 291, 293, 294 P.E.N. Club, Japan 167 Perez, Craig Santos 53, 338, 339, 341–5 Performance Studies 86–7, 92 Performative Theory of Assembly (Butler) 86, 88–9 Persistence of Memory (Spiderwoman Theater) 110 Perspective as Symbolic Form (Panofsky) 313 Peskin, Lawrence 98 Peterson, Carla 22 Philippines 33, 54–5, 59, 72; Michael Jackson and Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Centre (CPDRC) 126–9 Philippines/Spanish–American War (1899–1902) 56–7, 72, 338, 341 photographs: First Families 240–1; intertextuality 284–6; see also iconography and interpictoriality photographs and text: Here is Tijuana! 317–21; Palestinian exiles 63–6

377

Index Piatote, Beth 189 Pilgrim Fathers, arrival of 217, 219 “planetary”, definition of 362 “planetary expanse of transnational American writing” 357–8; fabricating ethnicity, displacing hemispheres 362–7; Mississippi and New Orleans 359–62; Monroe Doctrine metamorphoses 358–9 Planetary Modernisms (Friedman) 77 Poe, Edgar Alan: Translated Poe (Esplin, E. and de Gato, M. V.) 22–3 Poe, Edgar Alan (translated in 1880s New York) 139–41; Bonalde’s “El cuervo” (“The Raven”) 141–6; Martí’s fragments of “The Raven” 144–6 poetry: Chinese see Pound, Ezra; Guam 342–4; Mexico-US border 321–2; see also Poe, Edgar Alan; trans-indigènitude (international circuits of poetry) Pogson, Sarah 101–2 political autobiographies 266–7, 269–70, 271, 272–6 political Right see right-wing populism politics and aesthetics 310–11 popular culture: and high culture dichotomy 310; US, in Japan 33; Western movies 311–14 The (Post) Mistress (Highway) 109–10, 111–12 post-apocalyptic narratives 347; geographies 352–5; structural appropriation 347–50, 352–3, 355; third-worlding of the West 349–52 post-Civil War era: The American (James) 308; and Western movies 313–14 “post-colonial imperialism” 358–9 “post-truth” politics 298 postcolonial literature 37–8, 46 postcritical studies 44 postmodern hybrid cultures 317–18 Pound, Ezra 148–52, 155, 157–8, 160 Pratt, Mary Louise 33, 86, 87 Preah Kunlong (Samang) 106, 107 presidential campaigns and private lives 232–4, 238–9; Americanization of private sphere in European politics 243–9; common man image 241; First Family 239–41; sexual and moral integrity 242–3 presidents: heroic/celebrity 299–301; as national symbol 233–8; official portraits and photographs of 224–8 Prometeo (literary magazine/archive) 119, 123 public expectations of moral integrity of leaders 237–8 public lynchings, American South 285 public and private good 234–5 public and private sphere 238 Puerto Rico 362 Pullen, Christopher 189–90 Puritans: and Zionism 66; see also Founding Fathers

race and gender 99–102, 186–8, 321–2, 327, 334–5 racism: anti-Asian 174; Nazi Germany and American South 285 Radhakrishnan, Smitha 190–1 Ramirez, Renya K. 109 Rampersad, Arnold 22 Raphael: “School of Athens” fresco 226, 228 “The Raven” (Poe), Spanish translations 141–6 Reagan, Ronald: cowboy image 241, 242; and Sarkozy 245 relational studies 41–5, 47–8 religion see Christianity; Haitian vodou; Islamophobia; missionaries Renan, Ernst 31–2, 270, 274 Republican ideals 234–8 Richman, Karen 131, 132 “right to have rights” 68 right-wing populism 288–9; European perspective on Trump 302–3; narrative in politics 289–90; and Obama 283–4; political speech as play and database 292–4; post-narrative politics 290–1; symbolic forms and liminality 291–2 Rizal, José 54–5, 58–9 The Road (McCarthy) 351–2 Roberts, Brian Russell 36; and Stephens, M. A. 52, 53 Rockefeller Foundation 167, 168 Rodgers, Daniel 282–3, 287 romance novels, Japanese 173, 174 Rondon, Andres Miguel 302 Rooms of Our Own (Gubar) 203, 206, 207, 208–9, 210 Rosenthal, Joe: photograph of US marines, Iwo Jima (1945) 219, 220 Roth, Philip 299–300 Rowson, Susanna Haswell 99–101 Rubin-Dorsky, Jeffrey 22 Russia and Trump campaign 293–4 Said, Edward 61–8, 98, 159, 329, 333 Samang, Khvay 106, 107 Sandage, Scott 255 Santana, Cintia 15, 16, 17 Sargent, Henry 217, 219 Sarkozy, Nicolas 245 Savage, Edward 237, 240 Schleifer, Ronald 310, 311 Schroeder, Gerhard 232, 233, 244 Schwab, Mrs. George 256–7 The Searchers (Ford) 309–10 Seidensticker, Edward 168–9, 170–1 semiotics of interpictoriality 221–2, 228 Sennett, Richard 243–4 “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims” (Shohat) 66–7

378

Index settler colonialism see colonialism/imperialism; Zionism “sexuality” and “gender” 183–4 Sharupi, Maria Clara 123, 124 Sherringham, Michael 272 Shigematsu, Setsu and Camacho, Keith L. 74–5 Shinsekai (The New World) (San Francisco Japanese newspaper) 178 Shohat, Ella 66–7 Shuar poetry 123, 124 Silk Road initiative, China 160 Singer, Milton 85 Sinha, Indra 349, 353 “situatedness”/location 38 slavery 34, 47; Barbary analogy 98, 99, 100, 101, 102–4; Emancipation Day/West India Day, Rochester, New York 85, 87–90, 93; Ethiopianism 196; Fisk Jubilee Singers 132–4; Haitian vodou 130; Lincoln: African independence movements and Emancipation 254–65 Slaves in Algiers (Rowson) 99–101 Slaves in Barbary (Everett) 103 “slow violence” of environmental destruction 348, 349, 353 Smith, Bernard 36 Snow Country (Kawabata) 168–71 social class and intersectionality 186 social collapse, post-apocalyptic 350 social media 244, 246, 290 South Africa 264, 266; archives 268–9, 270; Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 268–9, 271, 276, see also Mandela, Nelson Souza, Pete: photograph of Reagan 242; photographs of Obama and family 226, 227, 228, 240–1 Soviet Union: containment theory 359 Sowell, Thomas 202 Spanish colonialism 56, 130, 321–2, 339, 341; arrival in “America” 217, 218; native stories and transcriptions 46 Spanish language: and English language: songs 323–4; indigenous poetry 121, 122, 123; and multilingualism, Muse and Drudge (Mullen) 321–2 Spanish–American War 359; Insular Cases 52, 339–40; Philippines–American War (1899–1902) 56–7, 72, 338, 341 Spanish–English translations 15–16, 121–3 Spiderwoman Theater 110, 111 Spivak, Gayatri C. 38, 341, 362, 365, 367 Stanford University: “canon wars” 33; Chinese Railroad Workers in North American Project 17–21; creative writing course 167; Pacific Spectator 167 Star Trek 190 statelessness 62–6, 67–8

“Steal Away to Jesus” 133–4 Steward, Frank R. 56–8 Stoughton, Cecil: photograph of Lyndon B. Johnson 225, 226 “stratification” of ethnonational groups 76 structural appropriation 347–50, 352–3, 355 Stuart, Gilbert: Lansdowne Portrait of George Washington 224 Supreme Court: Insular Cases 52, 339–40; sculptures 157, 158 Suzuki, Erin 76 symbols/symbolic forms: Atlantic 31; computer age 291–2; freedom and Lincoln 254–65; presidents 233–8; Western movies 311–12 Syria 284 Taiwan 35 “The Taming Power of Small Changes” (Hill) 123–4 Tanganyika 258 Taylor, Diana 86, 88, 91, 92 Taylor, Drew Hayden 108–9 television manufacturing, Tijuana 319–20 television media 300 temporal and spatial dimensions 36–8, 42–3, 47–8, 58; Native American drama 110–11 testimonials 270–1 texts: intertextuality 284–6; and relationship networks 44; see also photographs and text theatre see drama/theater They Don’t Care About Us (Jackson) 127–9 Thriller (Jackson) 126, 127 Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (Yamashita) 365 Tijuana 316–21 Tiramit (Sharupi) 123 Tompkins, Jane 205 totalitarianism/authoritarianism, American ignorance of 297–8, 301–3 trade, China 157, 160 trans: notion and intersectionality 334–5 trans-indigènitude (international circuits of poetry) 116–18; Abiayala (Latin American) 118, 119; building blocks and role of poetry 119; Medellín poetry festival 119–24; translation and bilanguaging need 124 transa: definition and techniques 316–24 “transliteration” of Native stories 46 transnational connectivity, history of 45–7 transnational criticism 62–3 transnational politics 64–5 transnational turn 73–4, 106–8, 202–4, 286–7 transpacific perspective 34; see also Pacific turn Tripoli 96, 97–8, 100–1, 102 Tropic of Orange (Yamashita) 365 Trump, Donald 72, 226, 227, 229, 290–1, 292–4, 359 Trump, Melania 226

379

Index Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), South Africa 268–9, 271, 276 Tunis 103 Tutu, Archbishop Desmond 264, 269 Twain, Mark: anthology and international scholarship 14–17; Mississippi River flood (1882) 360; To the Person Sitting in Darkness 338; translations 14–17, 23; “The War-Prayer” 9, 10, 11, 12 12 Million Black Voices: A History of the Negro in the Us (Wright) 57 12 Years a Slave 200 United Nations: Human Rights Council 328–9; Indigenous peoples 109, 116, 118; Special Political and Decolonization Committee 344; UNESCO 168, 328–9 Urashima legend, Japan 179–81 US Embassy: Jerusalem 328; Office of Cultural Exchange, Japan 165–6 Venezuela 140, 141 video: Cleveland Convention Center/right-wing populism 288; installation: Preah Kunlong (Samang) 106, 107 violence: of environmental destruction 348, 349, 353; see also post-apocalyptic narratives visual images see iconography and interpictoriality; photographs; presidential campaigns and private lives Walker, David 196 Wang, David 155, 157 War on Words (Campo) 367 Warrior, Robert 117 “The War-Prayer” (Twain) 9, 10, 11, 12 Washington, George: “Farewell Address” (1796) 358; image and portraits 224, 235–7, 240; and Nkrumah 260 The Washington Family (Savage) 237, 240 Watanna, Onoto: A Japanese Nightingale 173–4; literary Japanisme 176–8; retelling Urashima legend 179–81; willow pattern scenery 174–6, 181 The Water Knife (Bacigalupi) 350–1, 352 Weiss, Christine 239, 240, 242

West India Day/Emancipation Day, Rochester, New York 85, 87–90, 93 Western movies 311–14 What is the World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Cheah) 37–8 Wheatley, Phillis 195 Whitefield, George 156 The Wild Palms see Faulkner, William Williams, Raymond 183 Williams, R. John 149, 160 willow pattern 174–6, 181 Wolfe, Tom 301, 359 Wolfrey, Julian 184 The Woman Warrior (Kingston) 210 women: African American Ethiopianism 195, 198–200; African American missionaries 186–7; autobiography and criticism 204–11; industrial labor 319; Medellín poetry festival 120–4; Mexican-US border 321–2; and minority writers 33; and race (intersectionality) 99–102, 186–8, 321–2, 327, 334–5 Woolf, Virginia 204, 205–6, 207, 209–10 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Benjamin) 311 World Literature project 38, 43 World Wars 72, 297 worlding America (literature and culture): concept of worlding 41, 43–4, 48; relational studies 41–5, 47–8; transnational connectivity and early Americas 45–7 Wright, Richard 31, 57, 58 Xi Jinping 160 Yamashita, Karen Tei 365–6 Yao, Stephen G. 34 Yépez, Heriberto 316, 317–18 Yiddish language and translations 15 The Young Carolinians (Pogson) 101–2 YouTube 126, 127 Zhang Longxi 149 Zhang Tong and Schwartz, Barry 158–9 Zionism 66–8, 328–30 Žižek, Slavoj 291, 304

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